New hope for leaseholders
Money Box
BBC
4.2 • 825 Ratings
🗓️ 29 February 2020
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
People who bought leasehold homes from developers were "misled". That is the damning verdict of a report by the Competition and Markets Authority. They say its findings support calls for a change in the law in this area and that they are ready to take this fight to the courts to force developers to change their ways bringing new hope to leaseholders. Young savers in the government-backed pension scheme called NEST see their money grow more slowly than older people because their contributions are automatically put into a low risk, lower return fund.
And after years where hundreds of thousands of students have overpaid their student loans by hundreds of millions of pounds, the Student Loans Company is starting to trial a system to automatically refund customers who have over-paid on their student loan repayments.
Presenter: Paul Lewis Reporter: Dan Whitworth Producer: Alex Lewis Editor: Emma Rippon
Transcript
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| 0:46.0 | Hello, in today's program, why does the government-backed Nest pension scheme choose investments with low returns for people under 28? The student loans company says it has |
| 0:51.9 | a new system to refund graduates if they pay back more than they owe, and happy leap day, but are some being cheated out of a day's pay. |
| 1:01.1 | But we start with the accusation that many people who bought leasehold homes were misled by developers. |
| 1:07.9 | That's the damning verdict of a report by the Competition and Markets Authority, |
| 1:11.7 | the CMA, whose job is to make businesses be fair to consumers. It's a story we've been |
| 1:16.6 | following for some years now on Moneybox. Our reporter Dan Whitworth is with me for this latest |
| 1:21.5 | development. Dan, just first, though, remind us the difference between leasehold and freehold. |
| 1:26.2 | Okay, Paul, so someone who owns a property outright, including the land it's built on, is a |
| 1:31.1 | freeholder. Generally speaking, most houses are freehold, whereas flats tend to be leasehold. |
| 1:37.3 | But in recent years, that's been shifting with a big increase in the number of houses being |
| 1:42.2 | sold leasehold. Now, that's where someone only owns the |
| 1:45.1 | property, someone else owns the land. It costs money to buy the freehold and leaseholders will |
| 1:50.1 | usually have to pay extra money for things like ground rent and service charges. And when we've |
| 1:55.3 | looked at this before, Dan, those charges have been very high, haven't they? Yes, indeed. And in fact, |
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