Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill (Ninth sitting)

Andy Carter Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 30th January 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Lee Rowley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has a huge amount of knowledge, expertise and background in the subject. She is right to highlight the tension with agency. As long as there is sufficient knowledge in the decision being made, the logical extension is that the decision was made on the basis on the preponderance of the facts, and people should therefore be willing to accept the consequences of their choices.

Equally, through colleagues and in our postbags, we have all seen the reality that this does not work in all instances, and it is not necessarily clear where it works. We have examples of where an indication was given about some of these things, but the reality is very different from what may have been said during the sales process. A different estate manager may take over, the developer may disappear or things may change. The reality of what happens on the ground with estate management charges can be very different from what has been talked about.

The question is therefore not whether there is an issue, but how we drive up standards. Clause 41, which I will address in a moment, seeks to drive up standards through transparency. There is a perfectly legitimate question—it has been correctly posed via the amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire and by the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, and has been outlined by the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire and others—as to whether that is sufficient or whether additionality is needed. Although I cannot accept the amendments today, because I think that there are genuine questions about whether they would work, the Department wants to continue looking at the issue. I would be happy to talk about it at a future stage.

[Andy Carter (Warrington South) (Con)]

I am listening carefully to the debate. Warrington is a new town. Over the past 60 years, about 100,000 homes have been built in total. From looking carefully at the borough council’s own details on estate adoption, it is clear that there are currently 13 estates that are not adopted, where there have been agreements in place with the council but, for all kinds of reasons, developers are not doing anything. One problem seems to be that in many cases the estates are built out over many years and things change. Some estates have been building for 13 years. The builders have changed, the involvement of council officers has changed and the structure of how things are built out has changed.

There seems to be no redress for householders so that what was promised in the first place can be delivered. That is a real problem. When the Minister is looking carefully at the issue, can he bear in mind that it is not a straightforward case of “The developer promised to do this, but they haven’t”? Things can change dramatically over time, and there is a complicated path. I think that that is what the Minister is saying; it is certainly my experience in Warrington.

[Lee Rowley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If the Committee will indulge me, I have personal experience of examples of this in North East Derbyshire, and I know the complexity involved in getting this correct. I have an estate by an unnamed developer in the south of the constituency, near Wingerworth, where this discussion is going on already. Before Christmas, I spent two hours talking to representatives of owners on the estate and to the estate management company itself. I recognise the complexities on an estate that was being managed relatively adequately from afar but clearly still had issues.

The second example—this is why we have to be so careful to get this right—is from the other side. Fenton Street in Eckington has been unadopted for more than a century. The residents recognise that it is unadopted and have bought their houses understanding and acknowledging that. Possibly it was been adopted many decades ago, but there is no record.

We have to make sure that this works for everybody. In an ideal world, everybody would be scooped up and this would all be fixed in one fell swoop with whatever a benevolent Government could do, but that is not the reality of the choices that we face. Nor is it often the reality of what happens when a Government try to do things that work in the way that we all intend. Although I understand the intention behind the two amendments, I encourage hon. Members to withdraw them.