Example 1– Leaseholders Advisory Service
This is responsible to the Department for Communities and Local Government. The Chairmanship is carried out by Roger Southam for £9,184pa. The professional work is carried out by Chief Exec. Anthony Essien for which he is paid £75,000.
The body exists “To provide front line advice service on residential leasehold law and rights in England & Wales and on Park Homes.” It has no regulatory role and is only subject to triennial review, it has 19 employees and is funded to the tune of £1,034,000.
Roger Southam clearly has some relevant experience, he works independently in the property sector as his biography makes clear; “Roger Southam has an ability to solve problems and produce results in all areas of real estate. In a career spanning nearly 40 years he has managed, advised, and problem-solved on billions of pounds of property. Whatever the challenge he has the skillset and aptitude to tackle, address and resolve.”
In 2012 the Secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold reform, said in its Editorial, “Anyone who thought that last week’s annual conference of Leasehold Advisory Service, a quango paid for out of taxpayers’ money, would be a gathering of ordinary leaseholders, swapping ideas and experiences of managing their apartment blocks, would have been sadly deluded…It was, in fact, a very expensive trade show filled with representatives from RICS, ARMA, large-scale managing agents, landlords, solicitors and barristers who have twigged that payola is to be had in this unglamorous backwater of the law.”
In 2016 we get the scandal of ground rents doubling. In 2017 Peter Bottomley attended the Leaseholders Advisory Service AGM and threatend the organisation with privatisation (by 2020) unless it started to represent leaseholders. In April 2019 a new chair was appointed Wanda Goldwag.
So with a prediction that it looked bad in 2012, we are 7 years later and it just goes on Note: Doubling Ground-Rents