Retirement Property Management Companies: Regulation

Debate between Olly Glover and Simon Hoare

Tuesday 8th September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Let me say at the outset what a pleasure it is to see my good friend, the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), in her place replying to this debate. The whole House was delighted to see her promotion in the recent reshuffle. It was long overdue, and I look forward to how she replies to this debate to work out the benchmark for her appearances on future occasions.

The weight of documentation that I hold in my hands will give the House some indication of the weight of the problem that the organisation of retirement property management companies presents to many of our constituents across the country. My remarks are principally motivated by the lamentable behaviour of a company called Cognatum Estates, which runs three facilities in North Dorset: Home Farm in Iwerne Minster, Castle Gardens in Shaftesbury and Walpole Court in Puddletown. I have had constituents from those three facilities come to see me on many occasions, as well as write and email, with a growing list of concerns that seem to go absolutely ignored.

Those constituents should not take it particularly personally, because Cognatum has been presenting problems in other constituencies too. The hon. Members for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) and for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) and I met Cognatum representatives some little while ago to talk through the concerns that our constituents were sharing with us. They met, they listened and then they wrote to us to say, “Thank you very much indeed. We will never meet you again. Everything in the garden is rosy. We don’t recognise the evidence that you have given us.” There is a real problem here, and the Government need to act.

Unfortunately, I think I may be correct in highlighting a point raised by my constituent Jean Wilkinson, a resident of one of the Cognatum properties. She wrote to me as follows:

“It is also important to highlight that a significant number of residents are elderly and in poor health. As a result, many do not feel able to raise concerns or advocate for themselves. This creates a situation where important issues risk being overlooked and where residents feel they do not have a sufficient voice.”

I have had a number of emails from across the country and from other constituents that effectively mirror and echo that point. Madam Deputy Speaker, I know that you too have had issues in your constituency, albeit with a different company—we were talking about it earlier in the day.

Too many property management companies view their residents as elderly cash cows. They are people who have worked and saved hard, want to be independent in their older years, and do not want a huge amount of fuss and bother—they just want a quiet, peaceful, dignified, sensible, grown-up sort of a life. As one gets older, I am certain that one becomes a little less bullish in challenging and questioning authority. Anything for a quiet life: “If the service or management charges go up and I am not given a particularly clear explanation or cogent argument to support it, well, I’ll just write the cheque and pay, because it is the line of least resistance.” I am absolutely convinced that that is now a deep-set and ingrained way in which a lot of those companies operate.

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is setting out a compelling case for how providers of retirement homes and accommodation are letting people down, and the absence of redress that a lot of residents have. Does he agree that this is an area in which we desperately need more regulation and oversight, and that the Government need to take action to that effect?

[Simon Hoare]

I agree fundamentally with the hon. Gentleman. I will come on to that matter in a moment, because there are two very specific areas that I think require attention.

Cognatum does not get off scot-free because of one doggedly determined constituent, Peter Wintle, who lives in Home Farm of Iwerne Minster. He has cogently and sensibly asked questions over the years of Cognatum, only to be met with very little in reply. The issues that Peter has raised with me on behalf of those residents, which are echoed by others, is the absence of management transparency—a key and important thing—and accountability of the companies involved, as well as a lack of clear communication that sets out in easily digestible form information that residents require and openness on finance, explaining why service charges go up and why repairs or maintenance are being done in a certain way. There is a lackadaisical and tardy attitude in responding to issues and complaints raised by residents—all things that should not be expected. The complaints system is not worthy of the name. In the case of Cognatum, because of the way it organises itself, there are also unaudited accounts, which make it incredibly hard for anybody to follow the line on the balance sheet.

I give way to the hon. Gentleman, without whom no Adjournment debate would be complete.

Climate and Nature Bill

Debate between Olly Glover and Simon Hoare

2nd reading
Friday 24th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I rise in support of the Bill. As a co-sponsor, I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for not just introducing the Bill but the way in which she introduced it. Echoing the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) on what was a truly outstanding speech.

As a number of people have referenced, we only have temporary hold of our planet, so let’s start with a good old biblical quote, Genesis 3:19:

“for dust you are and to dust you shall return.”

We have only the lightest of steps on our planet, and we need to remind ourselves of that. The arrogance that, as the apex species, we have taken on our shoulders—the idea that we can do anything and some brainbox somewhere will find a way of ameliorating or attenuating it at some point, so it does not matter, should be part of historical political thinking. In that respect, the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) was absolutely correct.

I want to speak to my colleagues and my party and to those who would describe themselves as centre-right in the political spectrum. Conservatives conserve. We are and have been champions of a notion of handing things on to successor generations. That must mean, in today’s parlance, not just physical capital of pounds, shillings and pence and of assets, but natural capital. My party has a proud and innovative track record on these issues. It was Geoffrey Howe’s early 1980s Budget, in response to the issues of acid rain, that, through the carrot and stick policy, sought to make unleaded petrol cheaper than four-star, thereby driving people—another pun, I am afraid—to have catalytic converters. My noble friend John Gummer introduced the landfill tax, and the first hypothecated environmental tax in our country. It was a Conservative Government who introduced the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and a Conservative Government who put through the environment Acts of 1986, 1995 and 2021. The Clean Air Act 1956 was introduced by a Conservative Government. Excellent work was done by former colleagues in this House, such as Michael Gove, Rebecca Pow and others, who took these issues seriously, made the case, and we legislated.

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman outlined articulately how Government legislation can make a positive difference to our environment. Does he agree that as well as a relentless focus on housing targets, we should also have targets for amenities and for nature and green spaces, so that we can achieve lots of objectives and support the aims of the Bill?

[Simon Hoare]

The hon. Gentleman is right, and I wanted to echo the point raised by the hon. Member for South Cotswolds. I note the word “or”, but I like the word “and”. Indeed, I will share with the House that I am on a particularly stringent January diet. It is slightly working, I think, but there is still a long way to go. Ask any member of my family, and they would say, “Now Simon, would you like custard or cream?” and my eyebrows would shoot up at the word “or”, as I much prefer “and”. The hon. Lady was right: climate and nature are two sides of the same coin, and have a close, interwoven symbiotic relationship.

I say to the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) in response to his intervention, again echoing the hon. Member for Norwich South, that of course we must have growth, but too often the didacts from both sides of the debate say that it is either/or: we can either have a biodiverse natural environment and address climate change, or we can have growth, but we cannot have both. Well, it depends first on what type and kind of policies we pursue when addressing CO₂ emissions and the drive to net zero, but also on what type of growth one has. It must be a legitimate anxiety, but I am pretty confident that many people who elected the Labour party into government believed that they would get that fact: that the definition of “growth” needed to be reset in order to meet the challenges that we now face.

The Budget—I shall be charitable—did not quite land as the Chancellor of the Exchequer hoped or expected, and some of the economic indicators are not pointing in the direction that any Government would like to see. I hope it will not fall on deaf ears—the two Ministers on the Front Bench have a long and respected track record in addressing these issues when they sat on the Opposition Benches, which I hope they will continue now that they sit on the Treasury Bench. I hope that in order to prove this to people who are anxious about economic growth, and the fact that there does not appear to be very much, it will not be foot-to-the-floor growth of any type, anywhere, in order just to nudge the figures. It has to be the right kind of growth, and sustainability has to be at its heart.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich asked: is this Bill perfect? No, and I do not think that the hon. Member for South Cotswolds would claim perfection. My right hon. Friend said that he had never seen a private Member’s Bill that was perfect and beyond amendment; I have to say to him that in my nearly 10 years in this place, I have yet to see a Government Bill that could be described as perfect and without the possibility of improvement by amendment.

I say to my right hon. and hon. Friends: let us not sacrifice the good in pursuit of the excellent. We have to make progress. Are many of the issues addressed by the Bill difficult? Yes, but what do we all usually say to our children? “Things which are difficult are usually much more worthwhile seeking to attain than the easy, low-hanging fruit.” Will the Bill come with costs? Let us be frank: we must all be conscious that we have come through or are coming through a cost of living crisis, and inflation has eroded people’s ability to spend and fuel costs are high. But to those who simplistically say, “Well, we can’t afford to do this; now is not the right time in the economic cycle,” I say, with the greatest of politeness: if not now, when? I do not believe that we can afford not to do this. Failure to do so would be the longest suicide note in history for our species.

On our coastline, there are places that are built below sea level—one thinks of Canvey Island—so this is not just something that is happening elsewhere, about which we should be slightly anxious but not at all concerned. Rising sea levels and other changes will affect us here at home as well. We need to be careful in our consideration of that. For those who claim a driving concern about the need to control immigration, I say in all sincerity that I do not believe that one can divorce from that addressing the changes to our planet that climate change is introducing, as it will be a major spur for fellow members of our species to pack up their belongings, meagre or otherwise, and try to find a place of safety for themselves and their families, where they are able to grow a bit of food and sustain their lifestyles, meagre as they may be.

To those who say, “Hang on a moment, our emissions are not too bad, and we’ve got to look to China and everybody else,” I say: pollution does not respect international boundaries. It moves on the tides and the winds. We have lulled ourselves into a false sense of security, because, in essence, we have exported the production of many of our commodities—needed, desired and wanted—overseas. We have said, “Look, our manufacturing emissions have gone down,” but the production of those products is still creating emissions elsewhere. There are some noble aims in the Bill that we should think about.