We've discovered the sellers were lying about the length of the leasehold on the holiday home( quite how they thought they would get away with it I don't know!) but the searches/ Lamd Registry has discovered it's only 48 years and no way it can be extended as they only do 55 year leases in that area . It's just not long enough and will be hard to sell in a couple of years when it's even less : (
OG has said it all at 16:47. Leaseholds are an accident waiting to happen for 100,000's of thousands of people in Britain. They should have been outlawed years ago.
// there's no justification for keeping what clearly should be part of a package.//
There is every justification for saying that an owner ought to be able to lease part of his property out if he want to, and that he should be able to decide what is and what isn't part of the package.
The law already allows some contracts to be declared unfair in some circumstances. Leasing out in order to get one over on the buyer of a building ought to be one of those situations. Either someone has bought their home or they have not bought anything. There should never be a case of you have bought this but after a while you'll be screwed, and even earlier if you can't offload it onto another victim.
Y//Either someone has bought their home or they have not bought anything.//
They have bought the right to to hold the property for a number of years, which bit of that can you not grasp? I have bought and sold leasehold properties which I could never have afforded to buy had they been freehold, so there are benefits to leaseholds.