There are hundreds of thousands of people trapped in unsaleable properties due to cladding or other maintenance issues, onerous ground rent clauses or unreasonable service charges. Challenging any of these is expensive and has no guarantee of success, and even in the best case leaseholders are often waiting for years for freeholders to respond and act.

There is no incentive at present for freeholders to resolve issues in a timely manner, or at all - simply because it's not their problem. They don't care about the young couple who need to move to a larger home before they can start a longed-for family, or the retired person desperate to move closer to family who can support them. Freeholders have no reason to ensure that they seek a competitive tender for service charges, or resolve maintenance issues before they cause expensive damage to people's homes.

Giving leaseholders of unsaleable properties a right to force the freeholder to buy back the lease - at a good percentage of a RICS-valued price, and possibly after proving that the property cannot be sold on the open market - would make any issues the freeholder's problem, so they would have to resolve the issues or else being left trying to sell the empty properties themselves. This would let suffering leaseholders move on with their lives, instead of being trapped indefinitely by freeholders' careless mismanagement of their homes.