The housing minister has warned that leasehold is unlikely to be abolished until after the next election.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski has blasted Labour for u-turning on its original pledge, dropped in the run up to the last election, to abolish leasehold within its first 100 days of government.

Speaking yesterday at the Institute for Government in Westminster, housing minister Matthew Pennycook set out some of the barriers to ending the leasehold system and hit out at opponents’ claims.

Pennycook said that “leasehold is blighting lives” and an “an anachronism in the twenty-first century”.

According to the redacted transcript of his speech shared by the government he said: “That is why this [political content removed] government made a clear and unambiguous commitment in its manifesto to act [political content removed] and finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end.

“In making that manifesto commitment to bring the leasehold system to an end, we were not promising to immediately abolish leasehold outright.

“If outright abolition had been our intention, we would have stood on a manifesto that promised as much.

“We did not do so, and for good reason, because anyone, with even the most rudimentary knowledge of leasehold, knows that the outright and immediate abolition of circa five million English and Welsh leases is almost certainly impossible.”

Pennycook criticised posturing by political opponents such as Polanski, suggesting they were out of touch with the legal and practical barriers.

He said: “Those advocating for such an approach cannot answer how it would be lawful; how the impact on the mortgage market would be managed; how it would even be feasible for the land registry to delete millions of leasehold and freehold titles and replace them with commonhold ones overnight…”

He continued, asking how opponents proposed to instantly establish millions of commonhold associations or what the consequences would be for buildings that have already enfranchised or exercised the Right to Manage.

Pennycook said, of his opponents: “They can’t answer these questions because abolishing leasehold outright is a glib soundbite rather than a serious policy proposition.”

The housing minister went on to signal that the end of leasehold as a tenure would be unlikely to complete before the next election.

He said: “We made clear long ago, and well in advance of the general election, that the consequences of [political content removed] when it came to leasehold reform were that it would take this [political content removed] government a whole Parliament to deliver what leaseholders had been promised.”