New Developments: Unadopted Roads and Public Amenities

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Deirdre Costigan.)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Deirdre Costigan.)

I know that pulses have been racing all day in Westminster, but the moment is finally here: we come to tonight’s Adjournment debate on unadopted housing estates. The House may not be quite as packed as the other House was for the speech His Majesty gave earlier, but I think we have some of the best of the bunch of hon. Members from right across the Chamber here, including my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller). Protocol prevents him from intervening today, but I know that he has been dealing with a lot of these issues in his constituency, too.

I am very proud to be standing here as a member of a party that is committed to taking on so many of the big structural housing challenges facing communities right across the UK. We are committed to tackling the undersupply of homes, breaking down the barriers to better protection for renters, and doing more to liberate leaseholders from the feudal system that they are trapped in. It is really important that we meet the mark on unadopted estates—the topic of this debate—even if the issue does not always catch the same headlines as those other issues. The problem has been growing and growing. It arises when housing developers and local authorities fail to ensure that adequate measures are taken to adopt the roads and public amenities on new-build estates, which are being built across the country and have been over recent decades. It used to be typical that 5% to 10% of housing stock would be subject to this issue, having perhaps been marketed as a premium product, but recent research from the Home Builders Federation shows that over the last three years, 90% of estates were not adopted. What had been a marginal part of the system has, as a result of local authority cuts and developers sometimes looking to profiteer off the back of their new homeowners, become a much more endemic problem.

That is an issue for so many reasons. First and foremost, it means that those new homeowners—90% of new homeowners on estates built over the least three years—are essentially paying a new-home stealth tax. They are on the hook to estate management companies. They often pay hundreds of pounds in maintenance fees for services that other residents would receive by paying their council tax alone.

I am sure that residents in Gwallon Keas in my constituency are incredibly grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate, as am I. Does he agree that this is not just taxation by stealth, but an unsung privatisation by stealth of our public realm in recent decades? Does he, as I do, welcome the Minister’s recent commitment to working to reverse this terrible trend?

Absolutely; this is a stealth tax, but the issue is far wider than that, as I will explain. I look forward to the Government’s work to address it in a root-and-branch manner.

I commend the hon. Member on bringing this debate forward. What he is explaining happens round my way regularly. It is a scandal when hard-working people put all their life savings into a new-build home and then find that the estate’s roads are not even completed. The Department for Infrastructure back home is unwilling to take over the work, so the only way forward is through maintenance fees, and they rise every year. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government and the Minister, who is always very responsive to our requests, should bring forward clear guidance, for all the regions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that maintenance fees must be kept to the bare minimum?

Absolutely. The situation that the hon. Member highlights is far too common across every part of the United Kingdom. It is really important that the Government drive forward an ambitious solution that tackles all the issues that he has set out.

Homeowners on average pay £350 in maintenance fees. That is a significant sum of money, on top of their council tax bill, and fees often run to much more than that. I have had correspondence from residents who have been paying close to £1,000 in fees. That is exacerbated by the fact that the relationship with the management companies is often structured in a way that inflates the costs that have to be paid. We have heard examples of constituents having to pay up to £200 simply to have a lightbulb fixed on a street lamp, and some estates have been subdivided to the point where the biggest part of their bill each year is simply for having the accounts audited of a management company to which they do not want to be on the hook. They are being hit in the wallet, week in, week out, by fees that simply cannot be justified by the quality of the service that they are receiving. That is making them poorer not just in their wallet, but in their pride of place. This lack of accountability is not just inflating costs but leading to very poor service.

My hon. Friend touches on a key point that a group of residents of Moorside Drive in my constituency have recently spoken to me about. For well over a year, they have been trying to get the developer Gleeson to take responsibility for completing the resurfacing of a road on their new housing estate, and for maintaining the green spaces. Does he agree that we have to get this right, and bring developers like Gleeson to heel, so that they make investments and do the works to improve the quality of life of residents on these estates?

My hon. Friend is spot on in highlighting that Gleeson and many other developers right across the country are not fulfilling their crucial obligations, and new homeowners are being failed as a result. We owe them a duty of action over the coming years. Alongside the big challenges on quality of service, I have seen estates where the public realm has fallen into complete disrepair, roads are riddled with potholes, and playgrounds are unsafe and very poorly maintained.

My hon. Friend raises the issue of the facilities on new housing estates, and playgrounds in particular. One of the new estates in my constituency, the Ashdown House development, has been developed by Chartway homes and funded by Legal & General. A playground was promised as part of the development, as was a community centre, but they have not been delivered, to the shock of residents. Eight-year-old Gia came to my playground drop-in session to tell me about this, and to show me in her notebook—with a cat on the front—the many residents’ signatures she had collected to urge the developer to live up to its commitments. Does my hon. Friend agree that not only must the developers live up to their commitments, but the planning enforcement teams at Hastings borough council need to enforce the provision of services that developers have agreed to provide?

My hon. Friend is spot on. We should not tolerate the shirking of any responsibility by developers, but sadly that happens all too often on developments throughout the country, including in her constituency, and if developers fall short, we need councils to step up, meet their obligations and drag developers into delivering the valued community assets that new communities are desperately crying out for.

As well as there being poor service levels, important moments in homeowners’ lives can be put at jeopardy. A number of my constituents’ house sales have nearly fallen through—in one case the sale fell through completely —because of management companies’ failure to provide management packs in a timely fashion. That dragged out the process and made the already quite stressful buying of a new home even more difficult for far too many homeowners. We have to act. This is exactly the type of example of rip-off Britain—of unaccountable agencies and poor regulatory failures—that the Government have made it their mission to correct. I look forward to working with the Government to ensure that we deliver.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this important topic to the Chamber. We have had a great deal of development in my constituency, and we are seeing these issues play out in places like Cranbrook, Pinhoe and Lympstone. In Cranbrook, no grit bins were provided during the cold weather at the end of last year because the roads were unadopted. Local councillors were sloping their shoulders and the developers would not do anything. Local people were falling over and injuring themselves. In more extreme cases—this has been alluded to already, but I will not name the developments—people have not been able to sell their houses because the utility companies, councils and local people cannot agree on where things need to go. What more can be done to make the various groups accountable? What in today’s King’s Speech does the hon. Gentleman think will drive legislative changes to improve the situation?

The hon. Gentleman brings me seamlessly to my next point, which is what we can do about the matter. I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill in the previous Session, and I am glad to see that the Government are now consulting on two really important parts of it. The first relates to bringing forward recommendations from the Competition and Markets Authority’s 2024 report in respect of how we can stop estates becoming unadopted at source. It will not be easy to do—it is a thorny process—but it is imperative that as we build the homes that the country needs, we do not allow the problem to grow further, because it will always be harder to unpick retrospectively.

Secondly, we need to make sure that as we bring forward important protections to protect leaseholders from rip-off management companies, we extend the same protections to those on freeholder estates. That will not guarantee magic service overnight, but it will mean that freeholders have much more recourse when things go wrong. Those two ideas are the subject of consultation, and I look forward to working with the Minister to ensure that they are implemented as quickly and robustly as possible.

There is more that we can do. In introducing my private Member’s Bill, I alluded to the imperative to think about how we could introduce a stronger right for freeholders to manage their estates. I know that many of them do not want to be the ultimate managers of their estate—they want their estate to be adopted, and we need to work towards mechanisms to deliver that—but, in the meantime, such a power would give them far greater agency in trying to drag the marketplace to a point of better performance. It would put them in the driving seat, so that they can far more easily kick out managing agents who are not performing, and ensure they have far greater control over what happens on their estate.

As has been alluded to, we owe it to homeowners on legacy estates to start the thorny work of thinking about how we can best equip councils and developers, where needed, to fix the problems that remain on their estates so that they can progress towards adoption. It will not be easy. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, because, frustratingly, the legal agreements are so different from estate to estate. However, we owe it to those on estates that have been left abandoned for far too long by developers—and, at times, by local authorities—to work with them, to do that thorny legwork, and to think about what solutions could be possible.

I thank my genuinely honourable Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern), for securing this debate. He has been a tireless campaigner for leaseholders as long as I have known him.

Having a safe, well-maintained neighbourhood and a home to call your own should be in reach for everyone, which is why I have backed this Government’s mission to build more homes, albeit the right homes in the right places and with the right infrastructure. It is the job of government to give families, couples and individuals their homes, and it is one that I am proud to support. My first home was on a new build estate, like many of the ones we are talking about, and it meant the world to me to get my foot on the property ladder. I was proud and I felt as though I had really achieved a dream. But living on an unadopted new build estate, as I did, the reality was very different from what I had pictured.

The nature of unadopted estates means that residents are paying for a service that many people get through their council tax, meaning that simple maintenance is often just not done. It can result in unsafe paths, roads and parks. I have one constituent at Sancerre Grange in Eccleshall who uses a wheelchair. The footpaths on the estate were so badly maintained and uneven that she fell and was unable to move for 20 minutes until a passer-by found her. She now has to pay for taxis to get to and from appointments that she should be able to reach independently. That is a basic failure of accessibility, and it should not be happening in 2026. On The Crossings, residents have been waiting nearly 20 years for their roads to be adopted, which tells us everything about how slowly this system is working. We must take action now to fix the historical problems and give those families the safe neighbourhoods that they deserve.

I am proud to support this Government’s draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, which is a huge step forward for homeowners and shows real progress in fixing an outdated system. I support my hon. Friend’s ten-minute rule Bill—the things it would deliver sound excellent—but I also ask the Ministers what more the Government can do to protect those in fleecehold situations and to make sure that their roads, paths and parks are safe and fit for purpose.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) on securing this important debate. He is an incredibly hard-working and effective advocate for the interests of his constituency, and he has long championed action to address unadopted amenities on privately managed housing estates. I warmly commend him for his ongoing efforts to secure a fair deal for homeowners living on freehold estates in his constituency and across the rest of England. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Carlisle (Ms Minns) and for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore), and the hon. Member for Exmouth and Exeter East (David Reed), for their interventions in the debate, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) for sharing the experiences, which are clearly unacceptable, of residents on developments in her constituency.

Whether it be roads, street lighting, or sewers and drains, homeowners rightly expect that public amenities on new housing estates should be built to an acceptable standard that enables them, in due course, to be adopted by the local authority or other relevant body. Yet, for far too many homeowners, the experience of living on a newly developed housing estate has been tainted by the hidden and enduring consequences of unadopted infrastructure.

Unadopted roads and private estate amenities are not, in and of themselves, new, as my hon. Friend mentioned. What has changed is their prevalence and the impact of private estate management arrangements on homeowners. Roads, sewers, drains, green spaces and other amenities that historically would have been maintained by the local authority or utility companies are instead now routinely left to be managed by private estate management companies, often with little transparency or accountability. In many cases, the quality of the amenities on such freehold estates is inferior to those adopted by the relevant public authority, and falls far short of what people have a right to expect. Residential freeholders across the country frequently report open spaces not fit for purpose, roads left unsurfaced and drainage systems that are often little more than open ditches. These issues blight people’s lives and, with few of the rights to redress found in other markets and no ability to control the management of the estates on which they live, residents feel that they are being treated as second-class homeowners.