March 29, 2024

Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation tells Parliament: ‘feeling in retirement leasehold is that the bad guys always win’

Last Wednesday saw a session of Lord Best’s All Party Parliamentary Group on retirement housing and care. Sebastian O’Kelly, trustee of Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation / LKP, made the following points about private leasehold retirement housing to the APPG: In part, the elderly are not downsizing to retirement housing because they think they will […]

McCarthy and Stone float: before we expand retirement housing, here are a few urgent reforms …

COMMENT So the sharper end of the City reckons its punt on retirement housing may pay off next year. The Sunday Times article on the possible float of McCarthy and Stone was preceded by one in the FT, here According to the FT a number of investment banks have been in contact with McCarthy and […]

Meeting with shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds

Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation / LKP met shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds yesterday to discuss problems in the leasehold sector. The meeting was organised by Jim Fitzpatrick, the Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, who has some of the richest and poorest leaseholders in the country in his constituency. He has become a firm […]

The final exit fee – it’s your funeral, from McCarthy and Stone

A mischievous 80-year-old Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation reader sends in this latest flier that has popped into his letter box: the McCarthy and Stone funeral plan. The company that pioneered retirement leasehold – with exit fees, subletting fees, atrocious re-sale values etc – is eager to ensure that your “loved-ones” aren’t left out of […]

End transfer fees, or let LVTs rule on whether they are reasonable, says OFT

Parliament should end the levying of transfer fees – that is, exit fees and sub-letting fees – or allow the Leasehold Valuation Tribunals to rule on their reasonableness, This is one of the key findings in the Office of Fair Trading’s prolonged investigation – published today – into a lucrative and unjustifiable earner that is […]

Pensioner blames Peverel for loss of value to her flat

A pensioner who blames Peverel for reducing the value of her leasehold flat is having the case heard by mediators on December 11. And head of Peverel Retirement Keith Edgar – who leaves Peverel in December – is attending the hearing himself. For five years, Muriel McNally, 75, has been fighting the action, involving local […]

McCarthy and Stone and a media firestorm in 1991

The Dispatches programme on Monday night is not the first time McCarthy and Stone has been in the eye of a storm. In 1991 it launched a disastrous High Court action against the Daily Telegraph claiming £800,000 damages over articles about service charges. The fallout of the affair was that the housebuilder sold off Peverel […]

McCarthy and Stone proud of 35 years of ‘fairness and respect’

McCarthy and Stone has replied on its website to the exposé carried out by Channel Four’s Dispatches on Monday evening. You can read the page here It says: “Treating our customers with fairness and respect is at the cornerstone of what we do and over the course of the last 35 years, our staff have helped […]

Brilliant exposé of retirement leasehold on Channel Four Dispatches

Tonight’s Dispatches programme (September 24 2012) on retirement leasehold was a brilliant example of television journalism that was extremely damaging to both McCarthy and Stone, and to Peverel. It is excellent that Peverel’s disgraceful treatment of the pensioners at Strand Court, Rye, has been given a wider airing (search Strand Court on this site). But […]

Pensioner ‘spy’ to lift the lid on retirement leasehold 8pm tonight

On Monday night (8pm) Channel Four’s Dispatches carries out a special investigation in the fraught world of retirement leasehold with much of the material provided by an undercover pensioner ‘spy’. Campaign against retirement leasehold exploitation activists have been interviewed for the progamme, and we have given the filmmakers, October, every assistance over the past few […]