Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day

by Alfred Farthing Robbins

XIX.—OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?

The proposal to enfranchise leaseholds—that is, to enable a leaseholder, upon paying a fair price, to claim that his tenure be turned into freehold—is a comparatively new one in the field of practical politics; but it has come to the front so rapidly that it is already far nearer solution than others which have agitated the public mind for many years. The grievance had for a long time been felt, and in some parts of the kingdom sorely felt; but a ready remedy had not suggested itself, and the subject slept.

The grievance is this—that the present system of leases for lives or for a term of years causes frequent loss to the leaseholder and much injury to the community, benefiting only the owner of the soil. The remedy would be to empower a leaseholder to demand from the ground landlord that the land shall be transferred to him upon payment of its fair value, as appraised by some public tribunal.

And first as to the results which flow from the present state of things. These vary with the circumstances, and some of the circumstances demand study. Leases, broadly speaking, are of two kinds—those which are granted on lives and those which are for a specified term of years. Of the two, the former are the more objectionable, as they frequently work gross injustice. A lease is granted which shall expire at the death of the third of three persons named in the deed. Under that lease a man builds a house; the first life expires, and the leaseholder has to pay a fine—or, as it is called, a heriot—of a specified sum; the second dies, and another fine has to be paid; and when the third passes away, the property and all upon it revert to the landlord. Is it not easy to see that no particular chapter of accidents is required to terminate any three given lives within a comparatively short period, while, if an epidemic occurred, ground landlords everywhere would reap a rich harvest from the ready falling in of leases for lives?

One instance out of thousands may be quoted of how the system works. “A piece of land which let for £2 an acre as an agricultural rent was let for building purposes at £9 an acre, and divided into eleven plots. On one of these a poor man built a cottage, at a cost of £60, on a ground rent of 16s. 6d. The term was for three lives and one in reversion. The charge for the lease was £5. On the expiration of each of the three lives £1 was payable as a fine or heriot, and £10 was to be paid on nominating the life in reversion. All the four lives expired in twenty-eight years. The landlord thereupon took possession of the house. He had thus received in twenty-eight years, besides the annual ground rent, the following sums:—£5 for the lease, £10 for nomination of life in reversion, £3 as heriot on the expiration of the three lives—in all £18; and, in addition, the house built at the expense of the victim, which he sold for £58.”

The reply may be made, “But, granting that leases for lives often have cruel results, is not the remedy in the hands of those who want leases? Why do they take those for lives?” For this reason—that in some parts of the country it is the only way by which a building plot can be obtained, and that, as long as the possibility of securing so good a bargain is legalized, so long will the more unscrupulous among the landlords force an intending tenant to accept that or nothing.

Leases for long terms of years do not as readily lend themselves to the chance of legal robbery, but they have their own ill effects. Houses are built in flimsy fashion upon the express idea that they are intended to last only the specified term; and during the expiring years of the lease, repairs are grudged, and the dwellings rendered unhealthy to the occupier and unsafe to the passers-by. If a man has a house which is erected upon leasehold land, and therein builds up, by his own skill and industry, a good business, he is absolutely at the mercy of the ground landlord when the lease expires. The rent is raised because of the success his own faculties have secured, onerous conditions in the way of repairs are imposed, and what can he do? “If you don’t like it, you can leave it,” is the landlord’s reply; but there is many a business which does not bear transplanting, and if the tenant be on a large estate it might happen that, if he did not accede to the owner’s terms, he would have to move to a far-distant part of the town, or even—as at Devonport and Huddersfield among other places—out of the town altogether, and that would mean ruin. And thus he is practically compelled to struggle on in order to increase the wealth of the landlord, who has done nothing, at the expense of himself, who has done all.

And this is not always the worst, for in many cases landlords for various reasons will not renew at any price, and the tenant has perforce to go the moment his lease expires. A certain Whig duke—and, of course, a zealous defender of “the rights of property”—conceived the idea, upon coming into his estates some years ago, that a village stood too near his park gates. Not brooking that herdsmen and traders should stand between the wind and his nobility, he directed that, as leases fell in, the tenants should be cleared out, graciously, however, offering them other plots some three miles away. And the tenants had to leave the homes in which they had been born and where their parents had lived before them, and to see them tumble down in utter ruin, in order that so mighty a person as a duke should not be shocked by the sight of the common herd. It was one of the thousand cases in life where a man had a right to do that which it was not right for him to perform.

Another fashion in which grievous injustice to the leaseholder can be done is frequently illustrated. It has happened, and happened very recently, that a ground landlord has granted leases for a term of years; that, upon the strength of these agreements, houses have been built; and that upon the landlord’s decease it has been discovered by some skilful lawyer that the dead man had had no power, under an entail or settlement, to grant such leases; whereupon the heir has invoked the law to cancel the whole, and has seized everything upon the land. This is legal, but is it commonly honest?

In other ways the leasehold system is an injury not only to individuals but to the community. A west country town, where all the land is held by one man, has been crippled in every attempt to expand and improve by the impossibility of obtaining a freehold plot. What person in his senses would erect a substantial factory or a large concern of any kind upon a comparatively short lease? Men embark upon such enterprises in order that, as year follows year, their property may become more valuable, not that year by year it may become less so by the growing nearness of the time when it will pass to the landlord, who has never contributed a penny or a thought to the success of the concern, the building containing which, at the expiration of the lease, he can call his own.