paid for allowing them to be made, and when the lease is transferred to another leaseholder he makes the new leaseholder pay a "premium" (the modern word for "fine") over and above the price of the lease, for permission to buy the lease, and this "premium" is high in proportion to the value of the labours of the outgoing leaseholder. And if the lease is renewed, it is the same. The leaseholder has to pay a higher "premium," as well as a higher price. The leaseholder "improves the property," and the ground landlord makes him pay a heavy fine, not to the community, but to himself.
A recent instance of a "fine" happened in connection with a drapery establishment in Buckingham Palace Road. The tenant entered on a new lease, "which cost £4000 a year ground rent. It was very good of the landlord to have granted a lease at all, for he could have seized the whole business, goodwill, and everything. The landlord was not satisfied with this increased annual rent, but wanted something in advance, a 'sub,' but which he called a fine, amounting to £50,000." That is, as a man "may do what he will with his own," this landlord could, if it had suited him, have refused to renew the lease, and could have granted another lease to another man, who would have come into all the advantages gained by the draper who founded the business.[1] Here the tenant had made the land valuable, and the landlord demanded to benefit by his labour.
The process is usually this. A ground landlord grants a lease for ninety-nine years to a tenant who undertakes to build a house, or houses, on the land. As the houses will become the property of the ground landlord at the end of the lease, a clause is always inserted binding the lessee to build them in a suitable manner, and to hand them over at the end of the term in good repair. It very seldom happens that the original lessee and his representatives hold the lease for the whole ninety-nine years. Far more often, he or his heirs sell the remainder, of course with the landlord's consent, and under the same condition of handing over in good repair at the end.
The ground landlord is protected every way. He can
- ↑ This case was mentioned by Mr Hyder in a speech at Hendon, reported in Land and Labour, December 1906.
