Oral Answers to Questions

Greg Smith Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I always listen with respect to arguments made by a Kinnock, and in this case, I think the hon. Gentleman is broadly—broadly—in the right territory.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

What steps are being taken to ensure that planning authorities and, more importantly, the Planning Inspectorate are utilising the powers in the new NPPF to protect land use in food production?

[Michael Gove]

The NPPF could not be clearer about that. The new chief executive of the Planning Inspectorate is very aware of how important it is to ensure that there is public confidence in the NPPF.

Proposed British Jewish History Month

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols), not least because she has improved my knowledge of wrestling from absolutely nothing to slightly more than nothing. I celebrate all those Jewish stars of the wrestling world, just as I celebrate all those individuals whom my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) and others have listed from the worlds of entertainment, politics, industry and many more.

I am delighted to say that the Jewish population of Buckinghamshire is growing—it grew by 7% between the 2011 and 2021 censuses. I stand shoulder to shoulder with the community, which I am proud to represent. I want to see it thrive and go from strength to strength.

Notwithstanding the powerful comments that have been made about trying to ignore the haters, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis) said, we have to acknowledge that Jewish communities in Buckinghamshire and across the country are hurting right now. I was privileged to join the south Buckinghamshire Jewish community at a Hanukkah event at Waddesdon Manor in my constituency in December, led by the wonderful Rabbi Neil Janes. His opening words during the short ceremony really shocked me. He said, “We no longer feel confident to gather as a community.” That was in the United Kingdom in 2023. Of course, every community should be confident to gather in the United Kingdom in modern times. They should all be afforded our protection; they should all feel safe.

I put my thoughts about the event on social media, as we in this House have a tendency to do, and I said, not unreasonably, that we must defeat antisemitism. It took 45 seconds for one of the haters—whoever debbie.bennett21 is—to write underneath my Instagram post:

“Strange words ‘must be defeated’”.

What on earth was going through that individual’s mind?

I saw it yesterday under another of my posts, and I have now reported it to the police. A person taking issue with something I said about the conflict between Israel and Hamas—it is perfectly legitimate for someone to take issue with my view on that—asked on Instagram:

“Are you married to a Jew?”

Such outrageous behaviour is happening in our country right now, and it has to be stamped out.

I wanted to say this in the Chamber this afternoon, and to support the call of my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster for a Jewish history month, because one of the most important reasons why we study history is to understand what happened in the past and to ensure that the mistakes of the past, the horrors of the past and the evil of the past are not able to happen again. Yet we see history repeating itself, which is why we simply must have a Jewish history month to celebrate the contribution of all our Jewish communities and everything they have achieved and will continue to achieve.

As Members of Parliament, we all receive very difficult emails. We all have people come to see us at our surgeries in very difficult circumstances, with horrendous stories to tell. It is very rare that those stories reduce us to tears, but I received an email from a Jewish constituent, whose identity I will protect, openly saying:

“I have never felt as scared as I do right now to be in the UK… I’ve considered converting… I’ve gone to ground.”

She has turned off the ability to be found on social media. That should scare us all. It must put a bounce underneath us to ensure that we defeat antisemitism and enable all Jewish communities, all people of the Jewish faith, to live freely, securely and safely, and to feel welcome, here in the United Kingdom, whether they are British or otherwise.

Long-term Plan for Housing

Greg Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Lee Rowley]

My hon. Friend is a huge champion for her constituents in South Ribble. We need local plans in place. I saw when I first became an MP in North East Derbyshire, where the Labour council failed to put a local plan in place, the huge issues that causes for communities. I know there are other councils all around the country that fail to do that, and it causes so many issues. We have spoken about some of the challenges in South Ribble, and I am keen to work with my hon. Friend and to talk more about them over the weeks ahead. It is important that plans are put in place. Where councils are not performing—where they have not passed the threshold for the number of applications they need to pass or have lost too many on appeal—we will designate and we will be clear that changes are needed.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I place on record my gratitude to the Secretary of State for agreeing, this time last year, to put stronger protections for land use in food production into the NPPF, and to my hon. Friend the Minister for confirming today that they have survived the consultation period. Will he clarify, first, that the new language in the NPPF is a binary test where land is either used in food production or is not, ending the dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin lawyer’s paradise of arguing about what is best and most versatile, and, secondly, that the character test he spoke of applies to rural character as well as in urban environments?

[Lee Rowley]

On my hon. Friend’s second point, absolutely. On his first point, I will read the footnote to paragraph 1.81 of the NPPF:

“The availability of agricultural land used for food production should be considered”.

I hope that is helpful.

Oral Answers to Questions

Greg Smith Excerpts

Monday 4th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his place and echo the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State; it is great to see him back on the Front Bench.

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. Nobody is going to doubt that section 114 is a serious issue. As I have said to the Local Government Association and others, I do not think it is right for us to name and shame, point the finger or assign blame. We are intent on working with councils that have already alerted us to see what we can do to help, and on working alongside councils that have concerns to ensure they do not fall into that situation. I am not going to give a running commentary on that, save to make this pledge: we will work with those councils to ensure that they can continue to deliver for their voters.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

12. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero on the use of land for renewable energy generation.

[The Minister for Housing, Planning and Building Safety (Lee Rowley)]

The Government have in place a framework, developed in collaboration with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, that supports the deployment of renewable energy technologies. That is balanced by national planning policy, which is clear that land assets such as farmland must also be protected.

[Greg Smith]

On current usage, 2,000 acres of solar panels are required to power around 50,000 homes, whereas a small modular reactor requires just two football pitches and powers 1 million homes. Does my hon. Friend agree that solar is a highly inefficient land use, and can he confirm that the provision to protect land used in food production remains in the new national planning policy framework?

[Lee Rowley]

I know that my hon. Friend has a long-standing interest in this issue. We will be publishing more on the NPPF shortly, but he is absolutely right that we need a variety of different energy sources that can support the UK’s future energy needs.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Greg Smith Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 25th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and, indeed, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North again made it clear that in France and Germany the BDS campaign is outlawed in the way that we seek to do here. No one denies for a moment that France and Germany, under Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, are valued partners for peace and upholders of international law.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

On international agreements, does my right hon. Friend agree that, given that the United Kingdom is party to a series of World Trade Organisation framework agreements, such as the general procurement agreement, the UK has a duty not to discriminate in its trade practices, and that to permit public bodies to engage in antisemitic BDS activities would undermine our international agreements?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I thank him for his thoughtful contribution.

I recognise the sincerity and commitment of my opposite number, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner). Both she and her predecessor, the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), have been brave and forthright in calling out antisemitism wherever it occurs. I thank her for her work and the conversations we have had formally and informally on this issue. It is for that reason that I say, with respect, that I disagree. I understand the intent of the proposal from Labour’s Front-Bench team, but I disagree, because—as they acknowledge in their own amendment for ensuring that people cannot adopt, through an ambiguous form of words, a means of preventing people from accessing kosher or halal food—there is the potential, as lawyers have been clear, for an ambiguous form of words to be used in order, without mentioning Israel by name, to make it clear that a boycott campaign is directed against Israel. I think we all have a duty to be clear about that.

The BDS movement is clear in what it upholds: an evil campaign not just to eliminate the state of Israel but to target Palestinians who work with Israeli institutions. It has been crystal clear in recent weeks in its total failure—not just a failure, but a conscious desire not to express a shred of sympathy or regret for the loss of innocent lives. It is clear about what it wants to do to sow division. It is clear that its actions lead to, and have always led to, an increase in antisemitic attacks.

Those who speak for the Jewish community in this country have been clear as well. They respect the diversity and plurality of opinions in this House. They respect the motives, they respect the feelings, they respect the strong emotions that these issues engage. But they have also been clear that they wish this legislation to pass, they wish it to pass unamended, and they wish it to pass now. I honour them in their suffering, and it is for that reason that I urge the House to reject the amendments and to pass the Bill.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Greg Smith Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 17th October 2023 Commons Chamber

I urge all parties to do a little more thinking about how we level up areas and to ask why it is that so many people wish to visit huge amounts of private sector housing investment in places that are levelled up, while starving the rest of the country of it, when it is often the motor of the levelling up that they seek.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), who as ever spoke with sense and clarity. I have been heavily involved with this Bill throughout its passage, not least when sitting on the Bill Committee for six months. The Bill has been materially improved as we have gone through the process. I am not saying that it is all the way there yet, but it has been materially improved along the way. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for the time she has given me and right hon. and hon. Friends over recent days and weeks to engage on the substance of the Bill.

I start with Lords amendment 239 and the Government amendments in lieu that will remove the restrictions that have perversely persisted in the childcare system and local government for some time. I will not rehearse the arguments that were well made in the House last night in a general debate led by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) about the supply and demand challenges in childcare, but I genuinely believe that the Government amendments in lieu will make a big difference to the provision of childcare, which presents challenges in many of our communities.

I want briefly to add my voice to the debate about Lords amendment 22 on the challenging question of virtual meetings in local government. I have said before and I maintain my position that I hate virtual meetings. I cannot stand them and would always much rather meet someone in person. However, the Bill talks much about local decision making, devolution and letting people decide, and there is overwhelming demand—the evidence from the National Association of Local Councils shows that some 90% of town and parish councils want the ability to hold virtual meetings in some way to expand the ability of people to participate—so it is beyond me why we cannot in some way permit such local decision making to take place.

[Helen Morgan]

The hon. Member is making a very good point, and I agree with him entirely. It is really important to expand the range of people who have access to becoming a local councillor. People are not paid to be a full-time councillor, so they need to be given lots of opportunities to get to meetings and participate fully. Does he agree that this is a really important point about expanding representation?

[Greg Smith]

I do agree with the fundamental principle of expanding accessibility and the ability for people to take part in local government, particularly those heroes who are completely unpaid and unremunerated for the many hours they put in to town and parish councils around the country. Like the hon. Lady, I represent an entirely rural constituency, where parishes are often quite big. To look back to my own local government days in my 20s, I was a councillor in a London borough that was smaller, at 6.1 square miles, than every parish in the 335 square miles I am lucky enough to represent today. We have to look at the distances, even within a parish, that some people have to endure to go to a planning meeting or to get their voice heard on the very local issues that their town or parish council is determining. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to reflect on whether there is a way the Government can meet local demand for allowing, at least in part, some virtual access to local democracy.

The bulk of the Bill is about planning reform, and the lion’s share of the amendments we are considering relates to planning reform. It is a Bill that will affect every community across our entire United Kingdom, and the lens through which I look at a number of the amendments is to ask: do these amendments support, do nothing to, or hinder the so-called December compromise? That is the compromise that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State agreed with me and a number of right hon. and hon. Friends last December, not least my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) and my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely).

I shall start with Lords amendment 6 on the question of rural proofing. I absolutely and totally support locking into the Bill the concept of rural proofing, but there are a number of points I would ask the Minister to reflect on while making this particular commitment. Of course, anybody can say that they are going to “have regard to” anything at all. When I find myself in the supermarket with my children, I could have regard to their demand to put only chocolate, crisps and ice cream into the trolley. It does not mean that I am necessarily going to follow through on that, in my view, unreasonable demand. Much of the legislation we pass in this place can be judged upon, and under a legal challenge it is not unknown for the judiciary to look back at what was said at the Dispatch Box. I would therefore find it incredibly helpful if the Minister, in summing up, expanded a little on how the Government see that rural proofing. What are the defining principles of the rural proofing that the amendments in lieu of Lords amendment 6 talk about?

Inextricably linked to that has to be the content of the new national planning policy framework. It is a frustration that we are unable to see the final text of the NPPF until after the Bill achieves Royal Assent, not least because there are a lot of points that some of us fought hard for in the earlier stages of our consideration of the Bill that we were promised would be in the new NPPF and that will help to define this question of rural proofing. In particular, I was pleased to secure an amendment to the NPPF through the Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan) that explicitly changes the old language around

“best and most versatile agricultural land”

to the very tightly defined and binary question of land used in food production. That is because “best and most versatile” was always a lawyers’ paradise—a subjective test that could be argued to the nth degree. Changing the wording to protections for land used in food production makes it binary: it either is or is not. That will give clarity to planning authorities up and down the land when considering applications within our rural communities. I fear that food security is playing second fiddle to energy security when we see the vast swathes of solar applications and, likewise, the level of commercial and housing planning applications on agricultural land —on land used for food production. I include in that category 3b land, which is what most of my constituency is. It still manages to produce 10-tonne-a-hectare wheat yields, to graze cattle and sheep, and to produce the food we all like to eat.

The point I am getting to is that it is incumbent on the Government to recognise within rural proofing that rural needs to remain rural. Without farming—without agriculture, without farmers—there is no rural, because it is the farmers who maintain the landscape: it is the farmers who cut the hedges and keep our countryside as beautiful as it is. If we do not have that, there will be knock-on consequences on everything else that happens in the countryside, not least on the backbone of many rural economies: tourism. If it is not beautiful and it has all become solar farms, housing or commercial warehouses, we will not have the tourism offer either. I therefore encourage the Minister, when summing up, to reassure the House that in respect of the amendments in lieu of Lords amendment 6, rural proofing really does mean keeping the rural rural.

Turning to Lords amendment 44, I have considerable concern that when so much of the December compromise was about vesting local decisions in the hands of local authorities—in the hands of local people, where I believe decisions on planning matters absolutely should be taken, whether on housing need, commercial development or developments to do with energy security—the national development management policies are explicitly listed in the Bill as having primacy over those local decision-making mechanisms. I welcome the amendment in lieu that the Government have tabled to extend consultation to some degree; my initial preference was that the full parliamentary scrutiny lock that the Lords suggested would have been the preferable measure.

I ask the Minister and the wider Government to find a way of absolutely ensuring that when we say that local decision making is paramount, we really mean it and that there are not those get-out clauses that sometimes a statutory consultation simply cannot answer. Otherwise, we will set a dangerous precedent where people put in place their local plans and neighbourhood plans and believe that they are in control, but then a national monster—in whatever form it takes—comes along and walks all over that. The people of Buckinghamshire are all too aware of that with certain infrastructure projects being built through the county right now—I never miss an opportunity to get that in, Mr Deputy Speaker.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill (Fifth sitting)

Greg Smith Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

The amendments were tabled by the hon. Member for Caerphilly. We are discussing the part of the Bill that got the most comment on Second Reading. It had the most written submissions and witness statements, and considerable time was spent on this issue during the evidence sessions.

The hon. Member is trying to improve the Bill, which is a dog’s breakfast, so it is sometimes difficult to come up with the requisite amendments to try to sort it out. [Interruption.] If anybody wants to make an intervention, I am more than happy to take one. We are trying to amend the Bill so that it is acceptable to everyone. May I remind everyone that a number of Conservative Members were very exercised about this part of the Bill on Second Reading? We need to spend some time on this proposal to see whether we can come up with solutions, because there are real problems with clause 3(7) remaining in the Bill.

I remind Members of the exchange I had with the hon. Member for Caerphilly. It looks like we have a UK Government who want all public bodies to comply with their Foreign Office policy, but this area of the Bill appears to be in defiance of that policy. Why do I say that? Only a couple of days before Second Reading, Foreign Office Ministers made the position very clear during Foreign Office questions: they viewed the occupied territories as being illegal under international law. However, it is now being suggested in the Bill that a public body will not be able to disinvest from or boycott the occupied territories or the Golan Heights. There is a contradiction there, and the Government really need to look at that. It looks as though they are changing their Foreign Office policy through a piece of domestic legislation, and that is not the appropriate place to do it.

I sympathise with what the Trades Union Congress said about this issue: the Government are getting themselves into all sorts of difficulties. For example, they will be aware that the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into the situation in Palestine, which covers crimes that are alleged to have been committed since 2014. Under their statute, the UK Government have obligations under that investigation, and there is a real concern that they are not acting consistently to uphold international law in this regard. There are real concerns that the situation, whereby Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories and the Syrian Golan Heights for more than 50 years, is in violation of international law and, significantly, numerous UN resolutions. The UN resolutions are important; a Foreign Office Minister referred to them prior to Second Reading.

I remind the Committee that in presenting the Second Reading, the Minister and the Secretary of State made their position clear. As is stated in the Hansard reports of those debates, they said that they thought the Bill would not impact on the UK Government’s position in relation to the occupied territories and the Golan Heights. But I am afraid that my reading of the situation, which is shared by many others, is that that is exactly what it does. I will support amendments 5 and 6.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

I draw the Committee’s attention, as I did in the evidence sessions, to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I will not take up too much of the Committee’s time, but a point needs to be made on this important amendment and to be heard time and again. It relates to why Israel should be so significantly named, as apart from any other territory or country, in the Bill. For a start, Israel is a democracy in the middle east—a quite rare democracy in that region—the democratic values of which we need to seek to uphold.

More fundamentally, we should ask ourselves what the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is. In the written and oral evidence given to the Committee, we heard clearly not that the movement is just a little bit against Israel—it does not just have some sort of mild disagreement with Israel or the Government of the day in Israel—but that the leaders of the BDS movement explicitly talk about wanting the destruction of the state of Israel. Israel is the target of the BDS movement. Its leaders have repeatedly rejected a two-state solution, which has broad agreement across all the political parties here in the United Kingdom and in many other democracies around the world. The co-founder of the Palestinian BDS National Committee explicitly goes further, and states his opposition to Israel’s right to exist as a state of the Jewish people.

That is why we need such explicit recognition in the Bill, which I hope will go on to become an Act. It will protect our allies in Israel and stop the malign forces in the BNC membership, which includes a coalition of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—organisations that we in the United Kingdom proscribe. That is why I will vote against the amendments and seek to see the Bill pass through the Committee unamended.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill (Third sitting)

Greg Smith Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 7th September 2023 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you very much.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

Before we begin, may I say for the sake of transparency—I do not think that this is a fully declarable interest—that Steven Barrett is known to me as a councillor in Buckinghamshire?

Richard Hermer: For the sake of transparency, I am a Conservative councillor in Buckinghamshire unitary authority. That will not form part of any of the evidence that I give to this Committee. I am a parish councillor in Chepping Wycombe, but that role is not party-affiliated.

[The Chair]

You are clearly a very busy man.

Richard Hermer: That is very kind of you.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill (First sitting)

Greg Smith Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 5th September 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

I am the parliamentary chair of Labour Friends of Israel. It is a non-pecuniary position, but I have also been to Israel with Labour Friends of Israel.

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

As per my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, I have been on a trip to Israel funded by Conservative Friends of Israel, and James Gurd is personally known to me.

[Mark Jenkinson (Workington) (Con)]

As per my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, I have been on a trip to Israel funded by Conservative Friends of Israel, and James Gurd is personally known to me.

Freehold Estate Management Fees

Greg Smith Excerpts

Thursday 13th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) on securing this debate. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller). There is almost a temptation to leave it at just, “What he said”, but there are a number of points I wish to make.

Across the 335 square miles of my Buckingham constituency, new estates have been relentlessly built over recent years. My views on the need to build on brownfield land only and to protect agricultural land and our national food security are well known, but where houses have already been built or are being built at the moment, it is crucial that we try to rectify the mistakes of the past, and the issue of service charges and local authority adoption of those housing estates simply must be addressed.

Traditionally, when someone purchased a freehold property, ongoing costs were relating to maintaining their property and paying, rightfully, council tax bills to contribute towards local public services and the maintenance of the public realm—as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire said, the lamp posts, streets, pavements and playgrounds and ensuring that the verges are mown. It is those sorts of things. However, in recent decades, as hon. Members have said, developments have been sold as freehold but now come with often punishing service charges to cover land and facilities that are not passed to local council control and remain in private hands—sometimes that is the developer; sometimes they are sold to a third party.

The concept of a service charge is well established. Service charges were traditionally for flatted developments, which need to share the responsibility for communal spaces within and around those buildings. The properties are normally—traditionally—leasehold properties, and the concept of the service charge is closely linked to services that would never be undertaken by a public body.

To go back into history a little and give some context, the Georgian development of London squares did extend the role of the private developer. Service charges included access to those private squares, those private gardens, and some shared communal spaces in lieu of front gardens. However, a growing trend has been to sell freehold houses with freehold gardens but also with shared, communal external spaces and facilities—car parks and the like—that attract these new service charges. Unlike flats, with tightly defined communal space, or indeed those London squares, which are private and used only by adjoining residents, these recent developments have had the appearance of normal modern housing estates, with open access, and yet the communal assets are paid for by a select number of residents. We are talking about the roads, pavements, verges, play areas, balancing ponds and often, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire said, the sewerage and water supply. No one ever conceived in the past that those would be anything other than local authority managed or water company managed.

It is not obvious what is driving the cause of freeholder service charges. Is it driven by councils simply not being willing to adopt assets that they see a very high cost base in maintaining into the future—I would suggest that that is certainly part of it—or by developers keen to create a specific style or ambience that creates in its own right a unified development that just happens to be open to the general public: is it a sales pitch? Or is it driven by developers pushing to lower standards in the public realm where councils do not want to be landed with the liabilities.

Since before being elected in 2019, I have been contacted by countless residents living on such new build developments and estates. They are exasperated by the developers that have failed to complete what we would believe to be the fundamentals, the basics, of a development. I am referring to roads not completed—the final layer of tarmac not laid—footpaths yet to be laid, landscaping that has been forgotten and, in many cases, mounds of soil fenced off and awaiting redistribution.

We must ask what is causing these issues and what changes we can drive to deliver reform. Often, the problems that I just outlined have been deliberated designed to prevent transfer to another management company. They have been deliberately done to ensure that residents cannot get control themselves and that it remains in the hands of these management companies. The recent, growing concerns about freehold service charges are a result of many of those management companies being sold off to the third parties I mentioned earlier, which see the opportunity to increase charges way beyond the initial nominal amounts, further adding to the problems of freeholders, who, as hon. Members said before me, must still bear 100%—the full amount—of their council tax bill, with not even the slightest hint of a fair discount.

One could say that freeholders might expect service charges if they bought into one of the high-end, exclusive gated developments sold in some parts of the country, which aim at exclusivity and have additional features that standard council tax would never normally pay for. We are talking about things that very few in the country are able to have: private clubhouses, tennis courts, gyms, private leisure facilities, extravagant landscaping and the like. However, we are rarely talking about those developments, as section 106 and community infrastructure levy taxes developers to provide facilities to the council—facilities that are rightly used by the wider community.

That leads me to a philosophical question about the right to retain as private assets that are actually public, and that should be adopted and maintained by council tax payers—and, potentially, other taxpayers, through Government grants. We have not recently had a debate on where the line should be drawn—on encouraging new communities to take responsibility for their new assets, versus new assets being paid for by a new development, but being open to all.

Lace Hill in my constituency sits on the edge of Buckingham. It is a development of just over 700 homes. It comprises freehold houses with their own gardens, but residents must pay a service charge for playgrounds, landscaping, a balancing pond, the roads, the pavements and the verges. A casual visitor would imagine that they were regular roads, play areas, pavements and community facilities that the local council looks after, but it simply does not. The estate is also home to a primary school, a secondary school, play equipment and a multi-use games area that the whole town of Buckingham comes to enjoy, but they are wholly paid for—except for the core educational funding, clearly—by the freehold service charges placed on the residents of that relatively new estate.

Worse than that, Lace Hill faces the very issues that I described: there has been a failure by the developer to finish a lot of the features, not least the balancing pond. The area is very close to the Great Ouse river, which regularly floods; that brings a whole new dimension to the debate, which I will not go into now. That failure means that residents are unable to take control of the issue in the way that they should be able to. Also, the management company has sold and resold itself—and sold itself to itself in a different guise—which has led to mass confusion among residents about who they are paying the service charges to, and whom they can hold accountable for services that, for the most part, they have not actually had. I could give countless other examples, but I will not take up the time of the House by doing so; I will just briefly mention another particularly egregious example of this in my constituency: the Kingsbrook development, which sits just to the east of Aylesbury.

It is very hard to distinguish what counts as a facility that new homeowners may consider it worth paying more than the standard council tax for, because it is over and above the standard communal facility. However, from the way that homes are sold, it would appear that developers and the conveyancing profession have not been open and up front about the risks of some new estates being owned by third parties, and the service charge that would be made. That needs to be drawn more rigorously to the attention of home buyers, so that they are fully aware of what they are entering into, and of the risks of additional costs, increasing in perpetuity. In some circumstances, it would be reasonable for a development to wish to hold some assets privately, as they are over and above what is required by the national planning policy framework—maybe private sports facilities, such as the ones that I mentioned; or a concierge for security, key holding and parcel delivery. However, I suggest that those would be few and far between in the real world.

Some developers set up a residents’ management company, of which freeholders are members, so that they can have a say in the scale and quality of communal works needed or desired, and can influence the service charge fee, but in my experience, and from research in my constituency, that is all too rare. Sadly, freeholders have few controls if the developer retains the management, or sells it to a third party. It appears to too many developers that they can sell the management company as an investment, for it to be run by an uninterested third party. Ironically, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire mentioned, though leaseholders have access to the first-tier tribunal, the right of freeholders to challenge the reasonableness of the service charge is still not defined in law.

I come on to some of the recent debates, and the delays in solving the problems over the past six years. The Government and the Minister are aware of the issue, and I am grateful for the time that she has taken to talk privately to concerned colleagues. The July 2017 consultation paper, “Tackling unfair practices in the leasehold market”, highlighted the discrepancies and issues for freeholders in section 6, but that is some years ago. The Government rightly announced their intention to legislate in this area. In October 2018, they published a further consultation, and the Government response to it was published in June 2019, but we are still waiting for the legislation; they had committed to equal rights for freeholders and the right to manage for freeholders.

I believe that my hon. Friend the Minister wants to move forward, but there is impatience in the country, and impatience and frustration among my constituents and those of other right hon. and hon. Members. People living in freehold properties are caught up in service charges. We need to move much faster. It is imperative that the issue be resolved.

To summarise my main asks of the Minister, first, freeholders must have the same right as leaseholders to challenge service charge fees. Secondly, freeholders should have the same rights as leaseholders to set up resident management companies. Thirdly, and more fundamentally, should traditional housing estates have service charges? Should they not be better designed and integrated into existing settlements, with ongoing maintenance of communal playgrounds, roads, parks, verges and so on being at council tax payers’ expense? There should almost be a requirement for councils to adopt new developments. Fourthly, we should ensure better management of critical infrastructure, such as access roads and surface water drainage. They should be designed to meet the standards of the local flood authority, be constructed and warranted by the developer, and in time become part of the public drainage system, to ensure that they are managed in perpetuity. Fifthly, in order to avoid there being site-wide service charges, a limited number of properties should be allowed to share responsibility for some areas, such as shared driveways and off-street parking areas.

To conclude, it is simply an absurdity that the majority of developments granted planning permission in the public domain are not automatically adopted by local authorities. Ultimately, we could solve all the problems by making that a requirement.