After more than 25 years leading finance teams for major organisations like Notting Hill Genesis and Camden, I have finally hopped over the fence into the world of consultancy. I am incredibly humble and grateful to Rhiannon, Gurdeep and Dan for this opportunity to join the team at Ad Esse and focus on driving real improvements across the sector.

One of the best bits so far has been the remote working culture. I was told I could work from the moon as long as I had a decent internet connection, which, frankly, is the sort of flexibility I can get behind. I’ve already spent the first few days checking the lunar Wi-Fi signal and making sure my “lunar dust” Teams background is client-ready.

A few days in, Rhiannon, one of our beloved leaders, asked me to write a piece to launch my arrival. She suggested looking at this year’s King’s Speech regarding social housing, commonhold and its impact on service charges.

Commonhold and leasehold

The King’s Speech has placed commonhold and leasehold reform firmly back on the housing agenda. The headline is easy enough to understand, leasehold is under pressure, commonhold is being positioned as the future, and residents are being promised more control over their homes.

But for housing associations, councils, ALMOs, managing agents and service charge teams, the more practical question is this:

What happens to service charges when residents have stronger rights, better information and, in future, potentially more direct control over how their buildings are managed?

Because commonhold will not make service charges disappear.

The lifts still need servicing. Communal areas still need cleaning. Fire safety systems still need maintaining. Estates still need lighting, grounds maintenance, insurance, repairs, compliance checks and long-term asset planning.

What changes is the balance of power, scrutiny and expectation.

The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill announced in the King’s Speech proposes a new legal framework for commonhold, a ban on new leasehold flats so commonhold becomes the default tenure for flatted development, a new process for converting existing buildings, a ground rent cap, reforms to forfeiture and estate rentcharge enforcement, and other leaseholder protections.

That matters deeply for service charges.

Under the current leasehold model, many residents feel that they are paying charges they do not control, do not understand and cannot easily challenge. The Government’s own framing is clear in that the current system is weighted against leaseholders, with third-party landlords controlling management, shared facilities and related costs, rather than the people living in the building.

Commonhold is intended to change that dynamic.

Strictly speaking, commonhold uses a different legal structure from leasehold service charges. Contributions are generally managed through the commonhold association and the commonhold community statement. But the underlying disciplines remain the same. Costs must be properly budgeted, apportioned, evidenced, controlled, explained and recovered. 

That is where the real challenge sits.

For social housing providers, this is not just a leasehold reform issue. Many providers operate complex mixed-tenure estates with social rent tenants, affordable rent tenants, shared owners, leaseholders, freeholders, commercial units, housing association retained areas, managing agents, headleases and Section 106 arrangements. In that environment, service charge management is already difficult. Commonhold could make some things fairer, but it will also make weak data, weak apportionments and weak governance much harder to hide.

The organisations most exposed will be those that cannot clearly answer the basic questions residents are increasingly asking:

• What am I paying for?

• Was the service delivered?

• Why has the cost increased?

• Why is my share different from my neighbour’s?

• Who approved this budget?

• Where is the evidence?

• Why am I paying a managing agent fee when the service feels poor?

• Is this a service charge, a rentcharge, a reserve contribution, a sinking fund, an administration charge or something else entirely?

Those questions are not going away. In fact, reform will only sharpen them.

The Government has already moved to strengthen leaseholder transparency through the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act. It has consulted on standardised service charge documentation, clearer information about how charges are calculated and spent, better challenge rights, insurance transparency and restrictions around litigation costs.

At the same time, the latest RICS Service Charge Code is now in force, setting a refreshed professional benchmark for residential service charge management in England.

For boards and executive teams, the message is simple, and is not just a legal reform programme. It is a finance, data, governance, systems and resident confidence issue.

Of course, landlords have always needed to be able to justify service charges where challenged. Costs must be recoverable under the lease, reasonably incurred and supported by evidence.

But the direction of travel is clear. The bar is moving from “we can recover this” to “we can recover it, evidence it, explain it clearly and stand behind it under resident, tribunal, Ombudsman, regulator or board scrutiny.”

That requires more than a year-end spreadsheet.

It requires clean property hierarchies, reliable tenure data, mapped service areas, lease and tenancy analysis, robust charge codes, proper treatment of voids and commercial units, clear reserve fund logic, managing agent scrutiny, budget approval controls, actuals reconciliation, section 20 and section 20B discipline, and resident communications that ordinary people can understand.

For many landlords, that is where the gap is.

Service charge teams often inherit historic models built up over years of stock transfers, mergers, development schemes, managing agent arrangements and system changes. The result can be a patchwork of old assumptions, inconsistent apportionments, poor evidence trails and resident-facing explanations that do not match the complexity behind the scenes.

Commonhold will not fix that by itself.

If anything, it raises the bar.

In a commonhold world, residents will expect not just to receive information, but to understand it and influence decisions. That is healthy. But it also means housing providers need to be ready for a more transparent, participative and forensic environment.

The risk is not only overcharging. There is also under-recovery, cross-subsidy, leakage, poor budget setting, hidden deficits, unsupported reserves and weak contract management. In social housing, those issues do not sit neatly in the finance team. They affect affordability, trust, complaints, saleability, development viability, regulatory confidence and the ability to invest in existing homes.

The Social Housing Renewal Bill sits alongside this wider agenda, with the Government saying it wants to protect social housing stock, reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and give providers confidence to invest in more social and affordable homes.

That is the right ambition. But confidence to invest also depends on confidence in the numbers.

Service charges are often treated as an operational billing matter. They are not. They are a live test of whether a landlord understands its homes, its costs, its legal obligations and its residents.

The organisations that will be strongest in this new environment are the ones that move early. They will not wait for every regulation to commence before acting. They will review their schemes, cleanse their data, test their leases, challenge managing agent costs, rebuild budget evidence, improve resident communications and create a clear audit trail from invoice to resident bill.

That is where the sector needs to get to.

Commonhold may be the legal reform. But service charge transparency is the operational test.

And for social housing providers, the opportunity is bigger than compliance. Done properly, this is a chance to rebuild resident confidence, reduce avoidable disputes, improve governance, protect income, remove hidden subsidy and move service charges from firefighting to controlled delivery.

The question for landlords is no longer simply: can we charge it?

The better question is:

Can we prove it, explain it and stand behind it?

That is where the real reform begins.