I beg to move,
That this House has considered leasehold reform and new homes.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Harris. Yesterday, we had an excellent Report stage debate on the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill. I was really encouraged to hear from the Minister that the Government are looking at going further on two of the big things that we need to improve in the Bill: ending forfeiture and ending the private estates, or so-called fleecehold estates, model. I once again thank all the different bodies that have worked so hard to get us to this point, the Minister, who managed to get the time for this legislation, the ministerial team that came before him, and all the different bodies that provided useful evidence in Committee, including the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, the National Leasehold Campaign, Harry Scoffin and Free Leaseholders, HorNet, the HomeOwners Alliance, and many more.
I do not want to just repeat all the points we made yesterday, but I will briefly touch on some, because my speech flows on from them. Yesterday, I quoted my constituent Karen, who said that dealing with FirstPort, her fleecehold company, is
“like having a part time job”,
and who is being charged for, among other things, terrorism insurance for a fence. I quoted my constituent James, who says that he spent
“about 50 days’ work over the first couple of years”
dealing with his unadopted estate and trying to put right some of the mistakes made by developers.
I quoted the residents of Hursley Park, who managed to get control over their residents management company because of a legal mistake by the developer, but years on are still fighting to avoid being lumbered with the cost of botched work by Mulberry Homes. Disappointingly, that developer will not even meet them to discuss it. I also quoted one of the residents of the Farndon Fields estate, who has had a long battle with a faceless fleecehold company called Chamonix that billed people for large sums, did almost no work, repeatedly billed people several times for things they had already paid, and generally behaved appallingly.
I want to bring out how some of those stories show the different ways that we can intervene to get rid of this awful, scamming industry, which sees councils and developers effectively colluding to stiff residents with big bills and poor services. The first step is to look at how homes are sold. Numerous Members in yesterday’s debate talked about constituents who had not realised what they would be liable for. That seems to be particularly the case where people are bribed by the developers to use their lawyers—oddly enough, developers’ lawyers do not always point out the big bills that people will face. That is the first thing we should look at.
The second step is to look at the whole planning process and the fact that permission is often given before there is clarity on adoption. That is a bizarre way of going about things. The residents of Devana Way in my constituency, who I did not mention yesterday, found that out the hard way. They bought beautiful, expensive homes on a nice tree-lined street, but during the process of haggling with the county council over adoption and who was going to look after the trees, the developer concluded that it would be cheaper to simply rip out all the trees—and that is what it did one morning, to the horror of residents. I do not blame councils for wanting funds to look after trees; in fact, I think we should make it a priority in local government finance to make sure that all residential streets come with trees. However, there needs to be clarity about the rules of adoption up front, not after the fact.
Likewise, we need to stop developers wriggling out of planning conditions more generally through variations, as one developer is trying to do at the top of Kettering Road in Market Harborough—it is trying to get rid of a bus service it promised when it was trying to get planning permission. One of the most common abuses is that developers promise that there will be a new GP surgery as part of a new estate, but in fact have no plan, no intention or no way to deliver it. I am afraid I know several colleagues who have had that happen in their constituencies.
The Minister has promised to make progress on forfeiture, one of the most important things we have to deal with. That is important across leasehold and on fleecehold estates, too, because the disproportionate threat that someone might lose their home over a tiny unpaid sum enables the fleecehold cowboys to terrorise people into paying up. People are being conned about what they are buying. As we said yesterday, Margaret Thatcher said that there was no prouder word in our language than “freeholder”. Many of those people believe they are freeholders, but do not realise the threat hanging over them. My constituent Karen said that purchasers on her estate were not told that they would have to pay an annual rent charge:
“the word ‘rent’ wasn’t used by anyone we spoke to. It was referred to as a ‘maintenance charge’—if it was referred to at all. I didn’t fully understand what ‘rent charges’ meant until about four years after we bought.”
That is another way that people are being mugged by the fleecehold estates model.
We need to do two things. First, we need to help the 3 million to 4 million people who are stuck on fleecehold estates. We could do that through something such as a right to manage, or better still we could give them the opportunity to have their estates adopted by the council, which is what many of them want.
Secondly, we need to end this model for the future, which again could be done in numerous ways. We could do what my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) suggested and prevent companies from charging for things that are usually provided by councils. Alternatively, we could use guidance to ban the model except in extreme and exceptional circumstances. I do not mind how we go about it, but we have to end the model.