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When Labour wrote their manifesto before the last election, they promised reform to the

leasehold system of property ownership. But many people find themselves trapped in flats and say those promises have been

broken. Hello and welcome to Reality Check. Less spin more stats. I'm Michael Simmons, the

Spectator's economics editor. And to discuss all of this and where reform needs to go, I'm delighted

to be joined by Harry Scoffin, founder and campaigner from free leaseholders.

Harry, thank you for joining Reality Check. Now, I'm going to ask you to imagine I'm thick for a minute.

I'm not thick, I'm just Scottish. And we don't have this quite the same feudal property system

that you've got down in England.

So what is the freehold system?

What's gone wrong with it?

So what's happened is that for many years it was kind of the only way of organising a block of flats in England and Wales.

But what happened is that in recent years, sort of early 2000s, there were these sort of offshore property interests

that piled in to buying the freeholds underneath

leaseholders or flat owners' feet.

And what happened is that they turned it into a sort of cash machine

with gouging ground rents, soaring service charges,

fees to keep a cat to rent out the property. And what happened is that

...