Separating the leasehold hats

When people talk about leasehold blocks of flats, there's sometimes a conflation of some of the roles of the organisations involved. It can be quite frustrating and counterproductive. This article contains an extended analogy with the idea of "singer-songwriters" to illustrate how much of a problem this can be.

Roughly speaking, there are these types of organisations:

The fact that, sometimes, some of these might be the same people, should not derail every discussion.

Singer-songwriters

Imagine you're trying to discuss how long copyright in songs lasts: you have to deal with the differing lengths of copyright terms in sheet music versus recordings versus performances. They're also taxed differently in some countries. Now further imagine that someone in the conversation keeps confusing singers with songwriters, and keeps saying "singer" when he means "songwriter" because *some* songwriters are also singers(!)

It's hopeless: you can't criticise, say, singers (e.g., for the prevalence of tax avoidance schemes in the sector) because now you're complicit in a conversation that mixes them up with songwriters, who will smart from the criticism. You can't propose reforms, because people who otherwise agree with you have been saying things that are untrue out of sheer laziness, and you'll be lumped together with them by your opponents.

Back to buildings

So this is just a plea to call a spade a spade, and to stop calling a spade a hammer: