No leasehold, no landlord: what England and Wales can learn from Scotland

There’s a part of the United Kingdom where flats aren’t sold on leases at all. No ground rent. No freeholder sitting above the building. No lease ticking down towards zero. It isn’t a proposal or a pilot. It’s just how things have worked in Scotland for a very long time.

Leaseholders in England and Wales have had good reason to think about this lately. This week, in his first appearance at the Commons despatch box as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham confirmed that the government intends to bring forward its Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill in this parliamentary session, so that “finally we can reform this unfair system.” The draft version of that Bill, published in January 2026 under his predecessor, would cap ground rents on existing leases at £250 a year, ban the sale of most new leasehold flats, and make commonhold the default for new flats instead. It hasn’t been introduced to Parliament yet, and much of it remains some way off. But the direction is now firmly set: commonhold, not leasehold, as the future for flats.

Which makes this a good moment to look north. Not because the Scottish and English systems are identical, they aren’t, but because Scotland settles one question completely: can flats work without leasehold? They can, and they do, a few hundred miles away.

A quick and important note before we go on. SavvyPlace is built for England and Wales, where the law is leasehold, Right to Manage and (before long) commonhold. Scotland has an entirely separate legal system, and we don’t operate there. This piece is about what we can learn from it, not a service we offer across the border.

How Scotland does it

In Scotland, if you buy a flat, you own it outright. There’s no lease and no landlord. What you also own is a share of responsibility for the parts of the building everyone uses: the roof, the close, the walls that hold the whole thing up. That much sounds like commonhold, and in spirit it is.

Scotland didn’t only stop selling leases, it tidied up the leftovers. Where unusually long residential leases still existed, the Long Leases (Scotland) Act 2012 converted the qualifying ones into outright ownership in 2015, automatically, unless the tenant chose to opt out. That’s worth holding onto whenever the English debate turns to whether existing leaseholders get left behind by reform. It has been done before, in this country, within living memory.

The shared parts are governed mainly by the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004. Where a building’s title deeds don’t spell out how decisions get made, the Act supplies a default rulebook, the Tenement Management Scheme, covering how owners decide on repairs and how the costs are split. It’s a sensible backstop: even a building whose paperwork is vague still has a way to make a decision and share a bill.

Owners have two broad choices for the actual work of running the place. They can appoint a professional, called a “factor” in Scotland, who does much the same job as a managing agent does in England. Factors are regulated under the Property Factors (Scotland) Act 2011, with a statutory code of conduct and a public register. Or the owners can do it themselves.

“Self-factoring”: the Scottish word for what we do

That second option has a name north of the border: self-factoring. It’s the Scottish term for owners managing their building’s common parts themselves rather than paying a factor to do it.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Stripped of the different vocabulary, self-factoring is the same instinct that drives Right to Manage companies, residents’ management companies and share-of-freehold blocks in England and Wales: the people who live in a building deciding they can look after it themselves, and often better, than a distant professional would.

The mechanics rhyme, too. Scottish self-factoring owners keep a shared maintenance account, usually ask everyone for a float or deposit up front, organise repairs between them, and make decisions by majority under the rules in their deeds or the 2004 Act. Swap the terms and you could be describing a well-run RTM company in Manchester. The building doesn’t care what the law calls it. It needs the same things: money kept transparently, decisions made fairly, records kept properly, and someone paying attention to the roof before it leaks.

It isn’t frictionless there either, and it’s worth being honest about that. The most common problem in Scottish self-factoring is exactly the one small blocks know everywhere: the owner who won’t pay their share, or won’t engage, while everyone else waits. That’s not a Scottish problem or an English one. It’s a neighbours-sharing-a-building problem, and the answer is the same wherever you are: transparency, and a fair, visible process that nobody can argue with.

What this tells us about commonhold coming south

Commonhold, the model heading (slowly) towards England and Wales, is closer to the Scottish picture than to anything leaseholders here are used to. You’d own your flat outright, and share the common parts through an association you automatically belong to. No landlord, no ground rent, no lease running down.

Where does that stand right now? The amended Bill is expected to be introduced in autumn 2026, following the draft published in January and the committee scrutiny that reported in the spring, with Royal Assent hoped for around mid-2027. Even that looks ambitious, as the government has already said its response to the scrutiny committee will be late, and the ground rent cap itself isn’t expected to take effect until around 2028. So commonhold is coming, but “coming” here means years, not months. We’ve set out where we stand on commonhold separately, and our view is simple: we think it’s the fairer model and we’ll be glad to see it.

Scotland is the reassuring part of that story. One of the questions sometimes raised about commonhold is whether ordinary owners can really be trusted to run their own buildings without a landlord in charge. Scotland has been quietly answering that question for years. Under One Roof, the charity that advises Scottish tenement owners, reckons that somewhere between a third and a half of all flat owners there self-factor to some extent: looking after the building themselves, with no freeholder anywhere in the picture. That isn’t a fringe experiment. It’s a large slice of one country’s flats, run by the people who live in them, and the sky hasn’t fallen. Some do it brilliantly, some struggle, most muddle through capably, which is precisely what you’d expect of any group of people running anything.

There’s a lesson in what makes the difference, too. The Scottish buildings that self-factor well aren’t the ones with the cleverest owners. They’re the ones that are organised: a proper shared account, an agreed way to make decisions, clear records, and a habit of keeping everyone informed. Under One Roof’s own advice lands in the same place: the owners who get the best out of self-factoring are the ones with an owners’ association to keep communication flowing, and a maintenance account everyone pays into. The ones that struggle are the disorganised ones, where the money is murky and nobody’s quite sure who decided what. That’s the whole game, in Scotland and in England alike.

The throughline

Leasehold can feel, to the people trapped in its worse corners, like an immovable fact of life. Scotland is a standing reminder that it isn’t. Flats can be owned outright and run by the people who live in them, and in one part of this country they always have been.

For leaseholders in England and Wales, commonhold offers that same future eventually. But you don’t have to wait for it to start managing your building well, whether you’re an RTM company, an RMC or a share-of-freehold block. If you’re not sure which of those you are, our guide to the three structures will help. Because the thing Scotland proves, more than anything, is that good self-management was never really about the legal label. It’s about being organised, open and fair. That part you can start today, whatever the law above you happens to be called.

SavvyPlace operates in England and Wales only. Scotland’s system of property law is entirely separate and is discussed here for context, not as a service we provide. Reform timelines reflect government statements as at September 2026 and are subject to parliamentary process.