Most leaseholders have heard of the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 and the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024. Fewer know the Act in between — but if you've ever exercised the Right to Manage, or gone through collective enfranchisement, you've used law this Act created.
The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 received Royal Assent on 1 May 2002 and made three separate but related changes to English and Welsh property law: it introduced an entirely new form of ownership called commonhold, it created the Right to Manage as a new, lower-barrier alternative to buying the freehold, and it refined the collective enfranchisement process that the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 had established nine years earlier.
Of the three, Right to Manage and the collective enfranchisement refinements are the ones still doing heavy lifting in day-to-day leasehold practice today. Commonhold, despite being the Act's headline feature, has had a much smaller practical impact — more on why below.
Commonhold lets a flat owner hold their unit as outright freehold property — no lease, no ground rent, no diminishing lease term to worry about. Shared parts of the building (the roof, the stairwell, the grounds) are owned and managed collectively by a commonhold association made up of all the unit-holders, similar in spirit to a US condominium or HOA structure.
On paper, this solves most of the structural problems leasehold creates. In practice, uptake has been minimal since 2002 — only a small number of commonhold developments exist in England and Wales today. The main reasons: existing leasehold buildings needed unanimous agreement from every leaseholder and the freeholder to convert, which was rarely achievable, and developers building new blocks had little commercial incentive to choose commonhold over the traditional leasehold model, which let them retain (or sell on) a valuable freehold and ground rent income stream. The 2026 reform proposals aim to make commonhold the default for new flats, which the 2002 Act's version never achieved.
Right to Manage (RTM) is the part of the 2002 Act most leaseholders actually interact with. Before 2002, the only way to take control of your building's management was to buy the freehold outright through collective enfranchisement — expensive, and not always achievable if the freeholder wasn't willing to sell or the group couldn't raise the premium. RTM gave leaseholders a cheaper, faster route: take over management — appointing managing agents, controlling service charges, arranging maintenance — without paying anything for the right and without needing to prove the freeholder had done anything wrong.
RTM has since been amended by later legislation, most significantly the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, which expanded which buildings qualify and removed leaseholders' general liability for the freeholder's legal costs. But the basic right, and the "no fault needs to be proven" principle, both come directly from the 2002 Act. See our full Right to Manage guide for how the process works today.
The 1993 Act gave leaseholders the right to buy their freehold collectively, but the process it set out was complex and, in places, ambiguous. The 2002 Act tightened the qualifying criteria and the notice procedure — much of what's now the standard Section 13 Initial Notice process traces back to refinements made in 2002. See our collective enfranchisement guide for the current process.
UK leasehold reform has moved in stages, and the 2002 Act is the middle one:
It introduced commonhold as a new form of property ownership for England and Wales, created the Right to Manage (allowing leaseholders to take over building management without proving fault or buying the freehold), and reformed the collective enfranchisement process first introduced by the 1993 Act — including simplifying qualification criteria and introducing the current notice procedures.
Yes. Right to Manage and the collective enfranchisement notice procedure it established remain the operative legal framework today, though both have been amended by later legislation — most significantly the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.
Commonhold lets flat owners hold their unit freehold outright, with a commonhold association (owned by all unit-holders) managing shared areas — no leasehold, no ground rent, no diminishing lease term. Despite being introduced in 2002, uptake has been minimal, largely because it required unanimous agreement from developers and existing freeholders to convert, and new-build developers had little incentive to use it over the traditional leasehold model.
The 1967 Act created enfranchisement rights for houses, and the 1993 Act extended enfranchisement rights to flats and introduced individual lease extensions. The 2002 Act built on both by adding Right to Manage as a lower-barrier alternative to buying the freehold, and by refining the collective enfranchisement machinery the 1993 Act had established.
Yes. Right to Manage did not exist before the 2002 Act. It was a deliberate response to the fact that collective enfranchisement under the 1993 Act was expensive and required buying the freehold outright — RTM gave leaseholders a cheaper route to take control of building management without that cost or complexity.
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