Residential Estate Management Companies

Debate between Caroline Voaden and Calum Miller

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Voaden]

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.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

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?

[Caroline Voaden]

I absolutely agree and will come on to that as well.

As a new MP coming into this place, I realised that some issues would be pertinent only to my constituency and others would reflect similar casework elsewhere, but when I reached out to colleagues to see who else was dealing with casework about estate management and particularly FirstPort, I was shocked at the response I got. At least half my hon. Friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches are supporting residents whose properties and estates are managed by FirstPort, and a dozen of us were in the room to question managing director Martin King when he responded to our invitation and came to Parliament to answer some of our more urgent questions. Following our invitation, he was also invited by Labour and Conservative MPs. He must feel very popular with so many invitations to Parliament, but it is rather a reflection of the desperation of so many of our constituents, who have exhausted all other avenues to raise complaints with FirstPort.

Martin King’s company manages more than 310,000 homes across England, Wales and Scotland, so we are talking about at least half a million people dealing with just this one company. It is extremely disappointing to report that since the Lib Dem meeting, at which great things were promised, the only response we have received from the south-west regional operations director for the company has been one automatic email reply. It is not good enough.