Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps his Department is taking to protect buyers from the practice of gazumping in residential house purchases and sales.

The Government is committed to improving the home buying and selling process in order to make it quicker and less stressful. We recognise that on occasions, buyers can lose a property because they are 'gazumped' by the seller accepting a higher offer from another buyer.

To mitigate this risk, we have been exploring the adoption of voluntary reservation agreements. Buyers and sellers would make a legal commitment to proceed with the sale once an offer has been accepted and may include a financial commitment which would be surrendered to the other side if the party withdraws without good reason such as gazumping.

In order to be widely taken up, reservation agreements need to be attractive to buyers and sellers, and promoted by estate agents and legal representatives. Following behavioural insight research, work is now continuing to develop the agreements to make them an effective tool in improving the efficiency of home buying and selling and we hope to be able to evaluate their effectiveness next year