Residential Estate Management Companies

I beg to move,

That this House has considered residential estate management companies.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for listing this debate. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. It is good to see so many MPs back straight after the Easter break, ready to get stuck into the gritty issue of residential estate management companies, whose poor business practices have affected so many of our constituents. In that spirit, I come here today to address the Minister and to call for urgency from the Government in dealing with some serious issues, and for more regulation and new legislation.

The issues raised repeatedly by constituents cause not just frustration, but in some cases serious distress. They cost significant amounts of money and sometimes lead to the loss of the entire value of a property investment at the point of resale. The situation for both leaseholders and freeholders has become so bad that such estates are now commonly referred to as “fleecehold” instead of leasehold. We note that the Government’s White Paper on leasehold reform, published last month, said that their legislation will make conversion to commonhold easier, but we feel that that will not go far enough. We look forward to seeing the legislation laid before the House. The previous Secretary of State—then the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—said that he was a “man in a hurry” to liberate leaseholders from unfair practices. He clearly was not in quite enough of a hurry, so I urge haste on the current Secretary of State.

The Liberal Democrats have long called for reform for the 4.8 million existing leasehold properties in England. In fact, it has been a campaign of ours since Lloyd George introduced the people’s Budget in 1909. We will keep going until we see some change. We want leasehold tenures abolished for all properties, including flats, and we want all existing leaseholds converted into either freeholds or, where appropriate, commonholds. We are disappointed that existing leaseholders are not covered by the Government’s proposals and we urge a rethink.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. To add to the point she is making, is she not shocked by the scale of what we are seeing across the country? Of the new homes built in 2021-22 by the 11 largest developers, 80% are subject to fleecehold.

Yes, I absolutely agree. I will come on to that a little later.

To get back to the core issue of estate management companies, every type of resident—leaseholders and freeholders—is affected by rogue practices. Perversely, the situation is often more difficult for freeholders, who do not have the same statutory rights as leaseholders to take challenges to a first-tier tribunal. Where the landlord of an estate is a housing association, no one has any right to go to tribunal if that landlord fails to manage the property properly. That, too, needs to be looked at, but it falls outside the scope of today’s debate.

Whichever way we look at it, residents—whether housing association tenants, private tenants, owner-occupiers or retirees, living in a house or a flat—are being ignored, dismissed, intimidated and, frankly, fleeced by management companies that are not subject to any kind of regulation. We have all seen what happened in the water industry when private operators were allowed to focus solely on the profit line, ignoring their responsibilities to the environment while keeping shareholders happy. I believe we are looking at the next great scandal of our time: companies that may be owned by a shadowy collection of overseas investors eating up the smaller players in the UK market, building up their wealth and size so that they can ride roughshod over anyone who is tenacious enough to question their methods or ask for legitimate explanations of where their money has gone.

Across my constituency, from the largest developments with more than 1,000 homes to the smallest with just a dozen homes, residents are benighted by the lack of transparency of those who run the management companies. Does my hon. Friend agree that a great step forward would be for the Government to insist on the timely publication of itemised accounts, so it is much clearer to residents how their money is allegedly being spent on their behalf by the management companies?