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Let's leave the slavery parallel behind. I think it's hugely distasteful to compare a contract freely entered into by two parties (i.e. a ground rent) with humans as chattels.
I've spent the last four or five years in court against my freeholder. He is a millionaire with a legal team on retainer. We are first time buyers living in an ex council block in east London. More than one of my neighbours has gone long term sick with the stress, one has died. Leasehold is far from benign.
I think we have discussed before that I used to live in a flat with the same freeholder. He is a cunt. However, a one-off transfer of the net present value of your ground rent from him to you would not fix any of these issues. He would still be rich, you would be, say, £5k better off? (£150 starting rent & 25 year doubler for 125 years discounted at 5% Sportelli rate). As you know, that amount would not go far in these disputes. The prize they are fighting for in court is not the ground rent (which always gets paid), but the management fees and huge mark-ups on maintenance / major works costs.
I understand emotionally the desire to stick one in the eye of your adversary, but I don't see how it's a relevant substitute for leasehold reform or a justification for expropriation.
Separately, there does appear to be a small number of cases where homebuyers got crap & potentially conflicted legal advice and entered into onerous contracts (10-15 year doublers) without being advised anything was amiss. Those ground rents can also go fuck themselves.
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NickCJ
Don't get me wrong, you can go fuck yourself too, but we were talking about whether it was possible for a government to ban leasehold or if it would be a legal quagmire they'd never get out of. The slavery abolition act is clearly comparable in the sense of a governments obligations to those who benefit from a system which was legal prior to its outlawing - its literally just a question of how much they'd compensate the freeholders for.
And I'm not linking Grenfell with ground rents, but with the whole Leasehold system, and how it disconnects those who buy a building from those who live in it - whether the freeholder is the duke of westminster, a private third party, an offshore organisation, or a council, that disconnect persists. And the power imbalance in leasehold is summarised by ground rents, which are broadly (with some significant exceptions) benign but by the fact that we have one group of people who make all the decisions and have all the money but pay none of the costs, and another which pays all the bills but has very limited recourse to how that money is spent unless they fancy going to court.
I've spent the last four or five years in court against my freeholder. He is a millionaire with a legal team on retainer. We are first time buyers living in an ex council block in east London. More than one of my neighbours has gone long term sick with the stress, one has died. Leasehold is far from benign.