Generation Rent, we are always being told, are fed up of having to pay ‘dead’ money to their landlords. The rate of home ownership among 35- to 44-year-olds plunged from 74 per cent in 2003 to 56 per cent in 2019. But no one should think they will necessarily be better off, or feel more in control of their destiny, if they succeed in taking the plunge and buying a home. They could end up like me.

Notionally, I have become a home owner by virtue of buying a one-bedroom flat in an ‘affordable housing’ scheme in Wandsworth, south London. Yet I feel more like a serf who must pay an exorbitant annual tithe to her feudal overlord. In common with the ‘owners’ of Britain’s other 4.6 million leasehold properties, I will never actually own my property. The lease I bought is really just a long rental contract. The difference between this and the shorthold tenancies which govern most private rentals is that we, the leaseholders, have to stump up the cost of maintaining the building through ‘service charges’, levied on us by a management company employed by the freeholder. We also have to pay annual ‘ground rent’. The freeholder, not the leaseholder, decides which contractors to employ. We just get the invoice.

I feel more like a serf who must pay an exorbitant annual tithe to her feudal overlord

The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill, presented in parliament last week, promises to make life better for leaseholders. I ought to be full of hope. After all, in 2018, Rishi Sunak – then a local government minister – called leasehold a ‘scam’. But I am not holding my breath.

The proposals have already been watered down. When they were first put forward, the government was promising to abolish the leasehold system altogether, or at least to ban the sale of new apartment developments as leasehold. Instead, blocks would have to be ‘commonhold’ – an arrangement whereby the owners of individual flats jointly own the whole building. But that proposal has been ditched, leaving only a promise to cap ground rents and a few other measures to make it easier for groups of leaseholders to club together and buy their freehold. How much of this will actually make it into an act of parliament is debatable. Freeholders are a powerful vested interest and have been squashing proper reforms since 1909, when Lloyd George declared that leasehold ‘is not business, it is blackmail’.

Here’s how leasehold ownership has worked for me. When I bought my flat in 2013, it seemed to promise a future of financial freedom from landlords. I was nearly prostrate with gratitude. The property was one of 29 shared ownership homes built by the developer St George (part of the Berkeley Group) and sold to key workers and local first-time buyers through Notting Hill Housing (now Notting Hill Genesis). The homes were advertised by Wandsworth council and backed by then London mayor Boris Johnson.

But I didn’t really escape the clutches of rapacious landlords. On the contrary, I have two of them: St George, which owns the freehold, and Notting Hill, which owns the ‘head lease’ (I am not even the proper leaseholder, but am subject to an under-lease). Now unlike the tenant I was in my previous home, I can’t just pack my bags and leave if my landlord jacks up the rent. I must pay whatever the managing agents demand, until such time as I can manage to sell the lease.

The first big sign of trouble came in 2016, when the service charge doubled overnight. Had it started out at that level I wouldn’t have been able to take out a mortgage – my bank would have balked at my monthly outgoings. It was hardly as if we were getting a better service for our money from the managing agent, Rendall & Rittner. There are system failures, floods, car thefts and broken intercoms across the entire development. Efforts by me and my neighbours to find out why we had been charged so much went unanswered for two years.

Finally, in 2018, we were told, by Notting Hill, that St George had made ‘a mistake’ when designing our building. Like many London developments with an ‘affordable homes’ remit, the property was supposed to be split into two separate parts, with a ‘poor door’ segregating those who could afford homes on the open market and those in shared-ownership with a housing association. Unfortunately, however, St George did not build two entrances for their/our building – instead they built one. The rich folk could enter through our building’s front door, use our lifts and walk up to their apartments through our fire escape. Or they could enter via the doors and lifts in an adjacent block, which was constructed five years before ours. In 2015-16, two years after selling our building off, the landlord decided that only the shared-owners should shoulder the entire financial burden for maintaining its sole entrance, its vestibule, lifts and fire escape. As a result, our affordable homes were suddenly paying service charges as high as £4.61 per square foot while owners of the elite apartments in the adjacent building (its penthouse was on the market for £7.25 million the same year our apartments were sold off for less than £400,000) paid just £1.42.

My neighbours and I did not imagine that this could be lawful so we spent the next two years running around seeking legal services provided by the state, our MP, the new mayor and Wandsworth council, none of whom could help. So we pooled our resources and hired a solicitor. She told us that what St George was doing was indeed within its legal rights. Service charges are calculated according to impenetrable percentages in the ‘head lease’ between St George and Notting Hill – a lease we were not party to. According to our solicitor, the service charge was falsely stated in the marketing materials and in price stipulations, which our solicitors and mortgage providers had believed when we bought the properties.

She told us that, legally, service charges must be ‘fair’, ‘in proper proportion’ and ‘reasonable’. She advised us to take the issue to a First-tier Tribunal – a kind of court convened to settle disputes between freeholders and leaseholders – and essentially throw ourselves on the mercy of the judge, arguing that it simply isn’t ‘reasonable’ to make NHS bladder nurses pay higher ‘internal block costs’ than multimillionaires in the very same building.

We lost the case and found ourselves saddled with the freeholder’s £45,000 legal bill. And last Christmas we suffered another blow: the managing agents informed us that they were hiking the service charges by another 40 per cent because of energy prices. In order to cut these projected costs, they made two concierge workers redundant, further reducing the standard of service we are getting for our service charges. It was only thanks to one of the redundant workers sniffing smoke that a serious fire had been prevented. The fire alarm system, like so many things, was defective.

My neighbours with modest two-bedroom homes are now paying more than £7,000 a year in service charges – a sum beyond the means of the lecturers, NHS workers and other modestly paid families who live here. So much for ‘affordable’ homes.

Margaret Thatcher’s great ‘home-owning democracy’ isn’t working for leaseholders. Sunak’s government would be well-advised to note that Wandsworth, once the Iron Lady’s favourite council, thanks to its low tax and home-ownership promotion policies, turned Labour last year after 44 years. If the Tories want any sort of future in London, they would be minded to start prioritising the voters who live in leasehold homes, rather than the developers who build and, ultimately, own them.