The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Simon Hoare)
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) not only for raising this important issue but for the way in which she did so. I described her as my right hon. Friend; she is also a friend and near constituency neighbour in a neighbouring county, so it is a real delight for me to make my Dispatch Box debut responding to her debate this evening. I, too, congratulate her colleague Councillor Nick Adams-King for the work that he has been doing on this issue, along with my county neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax).
The first question that my right hon. Friend asked was how we can help. She was right to point out in her concluding remarks that such issues can often get passed from pillar to post—different names with different acronyms, with everybody trying to, Pontius-Pilate-like, wash their hands of it. My Department will not do that. Of course, her constituents are perfectly entitled to seek legal advice. That would come at a cost, and it may well be that the conveyancing at the time of purchase is worth a re-exploration.
Pausing there, my right hon. Friend presented to the House some pretty horrible and frightening figures. We are all conscious, particularly those of us who represent predominantly rural constituencies, of the fierce hit that the cost of living has had on many families, so we can only begin to wonder at the fear generated in the homes of the families and individuals who are being presented with these body-blow bills. The idea of their having to incur legal costs to try to seek a remedy, which is likely to be a long time coming, would not be a particularly welcome solution.
I have an invitation for my right hon. Friend to take up, together with her councillor colleague should she wish to. This is a rhetorical invitation; I think that she will bite my hand off. My noble friend Baroness Scott, to whom I have spoken, as it is her portfolio that would look at this, will convene a meeting in the Department to be attended by Aster and my right hon. Friend, picking up on the point that she alluded to in the letter of 4 September this year from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, which he addressed to the chief executive of the Aster Group.
Again just pausing there, I am not entirely sure this is still the situation, but I know that at the time when I introduced my Adjournment debate, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North referenced, the chief executive of the Aster Group was the highest paid chief executive in the housing association sector. It is not just our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State who is taking a personal interest in how the organisation continues to deliver its responsibilities; so too is my noble Friend Baroness Scott and so am I, because what the constituents of my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North have been presented with is indefensible and, frankly, bizarre.
From what my right hon. Friend has told the House in her powerful and persuasive speech, it seems that the housing association has spent little if any money investing in these local sewage plants, has understood the need now for investment—in some sort of a Damascene conversion to the need for housing providers to invest in maintenance and other repairs—realises that the costs are eye-wateringly high, and decides to reduce them for tenants and to pile on the costs to those who have merely, through the sweat of their brow and hard work, striven successfully to exercise their right to buy their former council house. And they are now being clobbered with above-inflation costs, subsidising those—one can see the argument for this, potentially—in the social rented market, and the housing association is then having the magnanimity, in this almost-upon-us season of good will, of defraying the costs until death. That seems to me not exactly in the spirit that we would expect people to be operating in.
My hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—no Adjournment debate would be complete without his presence—hit on an important point that occasionally this House has overlooked: the general transition over time of housing associations. When housing stock was transferred from local authorities, most if not all of the housing department went into that organisation, often a new organisation, and they took with them the mindset of supporting some of our most vulnerable constituents and the mindset of our public sector housing. Over time those people have retired and over time housing associations have grown very big; that does give them resilience in a fluctuating market, but it also means quite a lot of that local knowledge and empathy and understanding has been lost, and they are now operating in exactly the same sphere as our major private house builders. That is producing a change of ethos; my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North has brought this situation to the House, and I have to say that that is not a change for the better.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
It is great to see my hon. Friend at the Dispatch Box for the first time and I congratulate him. I am grateful to my constituency neighbour my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) for raising this issue and I have the same issue in the village of Hatherden in my constituency and want to make two points about what my hon. Friend the Minister was saying.
What was of course lost in the transfer he was talking about was councillors and the sensitivity that local councils would have to their residents in the way we are trying to give effect to this evening; that has been the biggest disconnection in housing. Also, one of the arguments that is put—I have had this with other issues of maintenance of stock in my constituency, where Aster is a large landlord—is a purely mathematical one: the housing association says, “You’re right, we haven’t really maintained this for 20 years, but we also haven’t charged you for it for 20 years so all we are doing is catching up on the charges,” and it fails to reflect on the economic hit to residents when an accumulation of charges is levied in one big blow.
Simon Hoare
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Whether Aster and others presuppose that merely the fact that a family or an individual has recognised that right to purchase their home suddenly makes them as rich as Croesus, I am not entirely sure. However, we can only imagine the very real anxiety that seeing these sorts of bills creates—particularly when this issue has come as a bolt from the blue, as I understood my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North to say. People were being told that everything was fine, that those local sewage works were absolutely up to scratch and that one could sell ones home in perfect confidence that there would be no extraordinary item for potential new purchasers to pick up.
Maybe it is a lack of investment, coupled with misleading those former tenants, that Aster will be questioned about at the departmental meeting—and they will attend; of that I am absolutely certain. We will make them attend to talk to Ministers and to make clear what they are going to do, because their current suggested modus operandi is neither sufficient nor acceptable.
Although it is in the future, I also point my right hon. Friend and her constituents to the leasehold and freehold Bill, which will be published later this month. That Bill is intended to drive up transparency of the estate management charges that homeowners have to pay, as well as giving homeowners the right to challenge the reasonableness—that is the key word, because after the Wednesbury case, reasonableness has a status in law—of those charges in the appropriate tribunal, which of course in England is the first-tier tribunal. The Bill will also include measures to help leaseholders to challenge service charges, including improved transparency requirements and scrapping the presumption that leaseholders should pay their landlord’s legal costs when challenging poor practice.
This Government are committed to providing the framework, but it is vital that potential homeowners have access to the right information before they buy. That information should, of course, be set out as part of the conveyancing process. I mentioned at the top of my remarks that, if a current homeowner such as those identified by my right hon. Friend is unhappy with the service they have received from the conveyancer or their solicitor, and the internal complaints process cannot resolve the issue, the legal ombudsman may be able to help.
In conclusion, I thank my right hon. Friend again for raising this issue in her inimitable style. The House always listens to her, because when she speaks she has something to say. She has spoken on behalf of her constituents very clearly and the Secretary of State, the Department and I share her concerns. She was right to quote directly from the Secretary of State’s letter to Aster of just a few months ago. My Department stands ready to work with her to ensure that her constituents, as well as those of my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset, are not—and here I will close by using the word my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North used in her speech—rinsed.
Question put and agreed to.