New Developments: Unadopted Roads and Public Amenities

David Reed Excerpts

Wednesday 13th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alistair Strathern]

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.

[David Reed (Exmouth and Exeter East) (Con)]

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?

[Alistair Strathern]

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.

Alongside those issues of fleecehold estates more generally, I want to spend one minute talking about a road in my constituency that will be known to pretty much anyone who lives near it, because it exemplifies some of the problems of unadopted and ownerless assets. It is Old Bridge Way in Shefford, the town I live in. Old Bridge Way is a private road built through the middle of the town. It is the only route people can take to our main supermarket in the area, Morrisons. As the town has grown over time, with planning consent as planned out by Central Bedfordshire council, that road, far from being a slight, small private road for an industrial estate, has become a major thoroughfare through the town—the main access point, as I say, to the supermarket, and used by buses and residents alike.

However, Old Bridge Way has never been adopted. As a result, despite collecting thousands and thousands of pounds in property fees from the adjoining properties, that landowner was not doing their duty to maintain it. Worse than that, the landowner got bored of doing their duty and decided to shirk it, instead transferring it to a separate company—with some similarly named directors, we might note—liquidating that company and evading that responsibility altogether, chucking it back to the Crown Estate to do what it could with it. That is the very definition of the lack of accountability that so many of my constituents are deeply fed up with—and without any mechanism for recourse, the problem will only get worse.

I was delighted to be able to pull together nearly 100 residents for a protest, closing down Old Bridge Way last year, to highlight to Central Bedfordshire council that we need the council, as the highways authority, to step up and play its role in providing a solution. I hope to be able to work both with the Minister and with Ministers in the Department for Transport on the long-term solutions we can put in place to tackle such issues. I am aware that, as awful as that road is, my constituency is not the only one across the country to have been blighted by such a terrible evasion of responsibility.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

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.

The Competition and Markets Authority, which has been mentioned, published a house building market study in 2024 that identified significant consumer detriment arising from the private management of unadopted public amenities on housing estates, and concluded that without Government intervention, this consumer detriment was likely to increase. This Government believe that homeowners living on freehold estates deserve a fair deal. That is why we pledged in our manifesto to act to bring the injustice of fleecehold private housing estates and unfair maintenance costs to an end. Our objective is clear: we are determined to reduce the prevalence of private estate management arrangements, which are the root cause of the problems experienced by many residential freeholders, and we also want to provide those who currently live on privately managed estates with greater rights and protections, so that the fees they pay are fair, transparent and robustly justified.

As my hon. Friend is fully aware, the Government are taking action to deliver on their manifesto commitments in this area. He rightly referenced the two comprehensive consultations that we launched on 18 December last year, both of which closed on 12 March. I do not intend to summarise the contents of those two quite lengthy consultations—I know that hon. Members have been engaging with them—but in simple terms, they sought views on how best to implement the new consumer protections for homeowners on freehold estates contained in the last Government’s Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, and on the ways in which we might reduce the prevalence of privately managed estates over the coming years. We are currently analysing the many responses received, with a view to setting out next steps in due course.

I am clear that our approach must be balanced. Homeowners must be protected. They should know before they buy whether the public amenities they will rely on will be adopted, and what that means for service standards and costs. Local authorities operating under significant pressures must have confidence that adoption is safe and sustainable and provides value for money. In turn, highways authorities and drainage bodies must know that any infrastructure and amenities offered for adoption meet proper standards and are durable.

[David Reed]

Like many other Members, I am exhausted by dealing with the Liberal Democrats on East Devon district council and Devon county council. They seem completely unaccountable, so can I ask the Ministers directly what can be done to make local government more accountable for the adoptions of roads?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I would refer the hon. Gentleman in the first instance to that CMA house building report, which says very clearly that a twin-track approach is needed. We need common adoptable standards. Only at the point that we have common standards can we force local authorities to adopt. I understand, as I know many hon. Members do, the dilemma that local authorities can face when they have substandard amenities and are asked to adopt them and incur all the costs of bringing them up to the necessary standard, as well as the cost of their ongoing maintenance.