Rayner Promises a Regulator for Managing Agents and a Cap on Leasehold Permission Fees

For once, the leasehold news is good. Housing Secretary Angela Rayner used her speech to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on 29 September 2026 to promise two things flat owners have asked for over many years: an independent regulator that will license estate agents, letting agents and managing agents, and a legal power to cap the permission and administration fees that freeholders charge leaseholders.

Both are steps in the right direction. Neither will change anything about a flat sale agreed this year or next, though. This article explains why, and what a seller can usefully do in the meantime.

What Rayner Announced

The speech covered four measures for leaseholders. Rayner described the property agent sector as one with "many decent businesses" that are "undermined by far too many cowboys, crooks and con artists".

• An independent regulator for property agents. Estate agents, letting agents, managing agents and the managers of freehold estates will all need a licence to operate, and will have to hold appropriate qualifications. The regulator will set codes of practice on conduct and complaint handling, and can take a licence away from an agent that breaks them.
• A power to cap permission fees. These are the charges a freeholder or its agent makes for consenting to something the lease says needs permission. Rayner said she had heard of leaseholders paying £250 for permission to keep a pet, £400 to change their own front door and a further £60 to fit a doorbell.
• A power to cap administration fees. The examples given were charges for supplying a building safety certificate and for registering a change of mortgage lender. A public consultation will decide which fees are capped and at what level.
• Ground rent. Rayner said she was "capping and then scrapping" ground rents, a hint that the government may eventually go further than the £250 a year cap already in the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill.

No dates were given. The government said it wants to bring the changes forward "as soon as possible".

Why This Is Good News for Flat Owners

The most important word in the announcement is licence. Until now, the only rule aimed specifically at managing agents in England has been membership of a redress scheme, which has applied since October 2014. That gives a leaseholder somewhere to complain, but nobody can stop a bad agent from trading. A licence that can be revoked changes that.

It also goes further than the government's own position in July. When ministers responded to their 2025 consultation on leaseholder protections on 15 July 2026, the plan for managing agents was mandatory qualifications overseen by professional bodies, with councils enforcing. That was welcome but modest. An independent regulator with licensing powers is the model Lord Best recommended in 2019, and it is what campaigners and most of the professional bodies have asked for since.

Badly run blocks are a real problem for sellers. When MPs debated managing agents on 2 July 2026, the standard of management came up as the single biggest source of frustration for leaseholders. Propertymark's Still a Life Sentence report, which we covered in our July article, found that 78 percent of agents had withdrawn a leasehold listing they could not sell. A buyer's solicitor asks detailed questions about how the block is run, and slow or evasive answers from a managing agent cost sales. Anything that raises the minimum standard for agents helps the people trying to sell flats in those blocks.

The fee cap matters too, even if the individual sums look small. Administration fees crop up at the end of a sale as well as during ownership. The seller pays for the management pack, usually £300 to £400 plus VAT. The buyer pays the freeholder's notice of transfer and notice of charge fees, typically £50 to £300 plus VAT, which is one of the things that makes a leasehold flat dearer to buy. Whether either falls within the cap is not yet clear, and the consultation will decide. If the pack fee does, it removes one of the more resented costs of selling a flat. We set out those costs in our July piece on the leasehold paperwork burden.

The Long Road Here: Seven Years Since Lord Best

The reason to temper the optimism is history. This regulator has been promised before.

1. October 2014 Letting and managing agents in England must join one of two government-approved redress schemes, The Property Ombudsman or the Property Redress Scheme. Councils can fine an agent up to £5,000 for not joining. That is still the only rule aimed specifically at them today.
2. 2018 The government commits to regulating property agents and sets up a working group under Lord Best to say how.
3. July 2019 The working group reports. It recommends a single independent regulator, licensing for all agents, mandatory qualifications and a code of practice. The government never formally responds.
4. March 2025 Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook says the government is "looking again at the 2019 report", in the light of the Grenfell Inquiry's final recommendations.
5. July 2025 to July 2026 A consultation on leaseholder protections proposes mandatory qualifications for managing agents. The government's response, a year later, confirms qualifications as a first step but stops short of a regulator.
6. 29 September 2026 Rayner commits to the full package: an independent regulator, licensing and codes of practice.

Seven years from recommendation to commitment is a long time, and the commitment is still a speech and a press notice. There is no bill, no draft clause and no date. If the regulator follows the pattern of other leasehold reforms, it will need primary legislation, then regulations, then time to set up the body itself before the first licence is issued.

What Leaseholders Can Already Do About Unfair Fees

A cap would be new. The right to challenge an unfair fee is not. Permission fees and administration fees are already covered by Schedule 11 to the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, which says a variable administration charge "is payable only to the extent that the amount of the charge is reasonable".

If you think a fee is too high, you can ask the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) to decide what you should pay. If the lease itself fixes the fee, you can ask the tribunal to vary the lease instead. The Leasehold Advisory Service, the free government-funded advice body, explains how to apply.

Few leaseholders use this route. There is an application fee, the process can take months and many people worry about legal costs. Most pay the £250 and move on. That is the real case for a cap. Leaseholders already have rights, but those rights are too slow and awkward to use against a £60 doorbell fee. A published limit would settle most of these arguments before they start.

The Other Side of the Argument

The announcement has weak points. The freeholders and managing agents on the receiving end also have a case worth hearing.

The examples are anecdotes. The £250 pet fee and the £400 door fee are cases Rayner said she had heard about. They are not survey findings. Fees like these clearly exist, but the government has not published data on how common they are or what a typical permission fee costs. The consultation should gather that evidence before any cap is set.

Some permission fees pay for real work. If a leaseholder wants to knock through a wall or move a bathroom, the freeholder needs a surveyor to check the plans and a solicitor to draw up a licence to alter. Those costs are genuine, and the lease usually says the leaseholder pays them. If a cap is set too low, or covers too much, some freeholders may refuse consent rather than grant it at a loss. That helps nobody. The consultation needs to treat a £60 doorbell differently from a structural alteration that needs professional checks. Our guide to the licence to alter explains how the process works.

Regulation costs money, and leaseholders may end up paying for it. Licences, qualifications and the running costs of a regulator will fall on agents first. Many will pass the cost on through service charges. Some agents have already put their fees up in anticipation, as we noted last year in why service charges are rising. Propertymark's chief executive Nathan Emerson welcomed the plan but said it must build on "professional standards already established". The Property Institute, the managing agents' professional body, already sets standards for its members. For a well-run agent, the new regime may add cost without adding much protection.

The track record on timing is poor. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 became law in May 2024. Most of it is still not in force, as we reported in July. The ground rent cap has slipped too. In June we reported ministers signalling late 2027. The BBC now says the government expects late 2028, with MPs pressing for 2027, after the Bill stalled during the summer's change of prime minister. Against that record, "as soon as possible" needs to be read with care. Our April piece on reform uncertainty looked at what the delays have already cost sellers.

None of this makes the announcement unwelcome. It does mean sellers should treat it as a direction of travel, not a date in the diary.

What It Means If You Are Selling Now

Nothing changes for a sale in 2026 or 2027. Your solicitor will still have to order a management pack from the managing agent so the buyer's solicitor can raise enquiries. The agent will still charge for it, and will still take as long as it takes. The Conveyancing Association puts the average wait at 54 days, and its director of delivery, Beth Rudolf, used the announcement to press for the regulator to set timescales as well as standards. The freeholder will still charge your buyer a notice fee after completion. If you altered the flat years ago without consent, that will still have to be dealt with before exchange, whether through retrospective consent, an indemnity policy or the price.

Two things may shift sooner. Stories about fees and badly run blocks have knocked buyers' confidence in flats, and a credible plan to fix them helps a little. It will not on its own reverse the pattern we reported this month, when four in five leasehold flats were still unsold after six months. And a regulator on the horizon gives sellers slightly more leverage now. An agent that knows licensing is coming has a reason to answer enquiries properly.

What Sellers Should Do, and What They Should Not

Do:

• Tell your solicitor about past alterations before you put the flat on the market. If you replaced a front door, moved a kitchen or fitted wooden floors without the freeholder's consent, do not approach the freeholder yourself. Your solicitor can weigh up the options: apply for retrospective consent, offer the buyer an indemnity policy or reflect it in the price. An indemnity policy is usually only available if the freeholder has not been contacted about the works, so asking first can close that option off. A buyer's solicitor will find the gap either way, and it stalls more sales than almost any other enquiry. Our guide to indemnity policies explains how they work.
• Budget for today's fees, not tomorrow's caps. Allow for the management pack and any consents or indemnity policy your solicitor advises. Order the pack around the time you go to market rather than months earlier, since a pack older than three to six months usually has to be updated at a further cost. Our guide to the LPE1 form covers what the pack contains.
• Challenge a fee that is plainly unreasonable, through the right route. Ask for a breakdown first. If the fee is still excessive, the tribunal route exists now. Put it in perspective, though: a £150 dispute is rarely worth holding up a £300,000 sale.
• Disclose any live dispute with the freeholder or the agent. The TA7 leasehold information form asks directly, and the consumer protection rules that govern property sales apply. A dispute found late in conveyancing does more damage than one disclosed at the start.

Do not:

• Do not wait for the regulator or the cap before selling. Both need primary legislation, a consultation and regulations. Neither will change your lease, your lease length or what a buyer will pay for your flat. If a fee dispute is your reason for waiting, resolve the dispute.
• Do not stop paying a fee because a cap is coming. Withholding a permission or administration charge can put you in breach of the lease. In the middle of a sale, that is a far bigger problem than the fee itself.
• Do not assume the cap will cover your management pack. The scope has not been decided. Treat the pack fee as a cost of selling until the consultation says otherwise.
• Do not expect a future regulator to fix a block that is badly run today. If your managing agent is the reason your flat is hard to sell, the tools are the ones that exist now: the redress scheme, the tribunal, or leaseholders taking over through the Right to Manage. Our guide to dealing with a difficult managing agent goes through them.

Our View

We often buy flats in blocks with slow or unhelpful managing agents. In some cases, a previous buyer has pulled out over delays in getting answers or concerns about high fees.

That is why we welcome this announcement. Managing agents should be qualified, licensed and accountable to an independent regulator. After seven years of reports and consultations, it is good to see the government commit to these reforms.

The short-term picture has not changed. A flat sold this year or next is sold under today's rules, with today's fees and today's managing agent. The sensible response is to prepare for the enquiries every leasehold sale brings: past alterations raised with your solicitor, the management pack ordered at the right time, the block's paperwork in order and any problems disclosed early. Sellers who do that will be in good shape whatever Parliament does next, and whenever it does it.

Sometimes a fee dispute, a difficult agent or an unmortgageable block is what stands between you and a sale. In that case a direct sale to a cash buyer takes the lender, and the lender's questions, out of the process. The trade-off is price. A cash offer is usually 15 to 30 percent below open market value, and we explain that openly on our how it works page.

This article reflects the position on 29 September 2026 and is general information, not legal advice. The proposals described are announcements, not law, and their scope and timing may change.