The Leasehold and Freehold Bill is the most significant reform of the leasehold system for a generation, and many – including me – hope that this assault on all its outrageous income streams are its death knell. Other jurisdictions have versions of commonhold, and so should England and Wales.

This won’t be popular with freehold investors, or the terracotta army of lawyers, valuers, chartered surveyors, managing agents and insurance whose income comes from our puposely complex and inefficient leasehold system.

But, as the great US journalist Upton Sinclair said in the 1920s: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Why is the government launching this assault on the leasehold, and why now?

Government – both the deep state and the Conservative administration – has become increasingly dis-enamoured of the residential property sector, in spite of its generous party donations.

Spreading leasehold houses around the country and squirrelling in aggressive 10-year doubling ground rents and other income earners in the leases was a disillusioning surprise. Not least because the plc housebuilders responsible were so generously subsidised by Help To Buy and grants from Homes England. So as well as quite knowingly dumping their customers into a mire of ordure, they were ripping off the rest of us as well.

In fact, the leasehold houses scam self-corrected quite quickly in 2017, as consumers simply refused to buy these products. In addition, dozy mortgage lenders who had originally signed off on them, realised resales with such aggressive ground rent terms were impossible, and so switched off financing on ground rents above 0.1% of sales price.

Even worse was the fallout after the Grenfell tragedy. LKP was warning in the autumn of 2017 that it did not believe leasehold would survive the kind of scrutiny that would result.

As well as building with rip-off legal tenure, our cartel of major housebuilders built spectacularly badly. The sectors suppliers cheated the existing safety regime. The Grenfell inquiry report is awaited. So it is still an open question whether corporate manslaughter charges will result.

The upshot has been a multi-billion bill for taxpayers to put right the nation’s highrise blocks, and a deeply unpopular levy on the housebuilders to cough up.