[5] In early Norman England, tenants could lease their title to land so that the land-owning lords did not have any power over the sub-tenant to collect taxes.
In 1290 King Edward I passed the Statute of Quia Emptores that prevented tenants from leasing their lands to others through subinfeudation.
This created a system of substitution, where the tenant's full interest would be transferred to the purchaser or donee, who would pay a rentcharge.
[8][non-primary source needed] Lord Eldon observed in 1815 that the context in which the term occurred may materially vary its meaning.
By the early 20th century the politics of property ownership was changing and there was a recognition that many working people were living in accommodation which they did not truly own, they had purchased a wasting asset and could lose their homes on expiry of the ground lease on it.
Freeholders found that the reversion of the property to them was being pushed further into the future and this, allied with the rise in corporate property ownership requiring shorter term investment returns, led some freeholders to consider the ground rent itself a form of investment and in many cases sought to maximise it.
[10] The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 and associated regulations[11] now govern the form of notice that needs to be issued to collect ground rent.
Normally they focus on purchasing reversionary ground rents, either for initial income or for the opportunity of a reversion of the underlying property at some point in the future.
[13][14] Before selling ground rents, statute obliges the transactional parties to serve Section V notices on the long leaseholders.
The only case in which such notices are irrelevant is for exchange of contracts on the sale and purchase of the ground rent of flats before 50% of them were sold.
This then allows for the sum to pass and ground rent rights in return, even after all the flats are sold, without individual notices.
But in the 2010s, developers and builders often granted leases for new homes with ground rents as high as £1000 per annum, with escalation clauses doubling them every 5 or 10 years.
This can result in immediate and/or subsequent mortgage refusals from lenders and their valuers, which makes the property sellable below the market price.
In response to questions raised by the MP, communities secretary Sajid Javid said: "We must make sure the kind of abuses he mentioned are stamped out and we will continue to do everything [we can].
[16][17] In June 2018 the UK government announced that leasehold tenure would be reformed, with new long leases having zero ground rent.
[19][20] In Scots law, the term 'ground rent' is not employed, but its place is taken, for practical purposes, by the ground annual, which bears a double meaning: Feu duty in Scotland was ended by the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc.
[24] Notably, ground rents in Castlebar, County Mayo have been withheld following the controversial disappearance of Lord Lucan in 1974.
However most Dutch municipalities (including Rotterdam, Den Bosch, Eindhoven, Haarlem, and Maastricht) are currently abandoning the system, and offering householders the right to buy their plot of land.
Banks have decided to do this because they fear that the landowner will implement substantial increases, which will lead to payment problems for the leaseholder.
[35] The new laws were contested in court for some ground owners, who called it an unconstitutional taking of property without fair compensation.
[40] The Stanhope, which converted to a co-op in 2005, has a lease agreement covering fixed rental terms lasting 150 years.
Since ground rent was a freehold estate, created by deed, and perpetual in duration, no presumption that it had been released could, at common law, arise from lapse of time.