Justin Madders
MP for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough · Labour · United Kingdom
“Friend the Member for Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard asked about, will consider the points raised in this debate and whether any of them can be put into future updates to guidance. As was mentioned, good passenger information is central to standards.”
“As the roads Minister, I of course recognise the importance of bus stops and the important effect they have on the streetscape. My hon. Friend the Member for Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard made clear that she is passionate and informed about the importance of bus journeys to everyone.”
“Where responsibility for highways or individual assets sits elsewhere, close and effective working between the relevant authorities is essential. We expect local plans to join up services, infrastructure and passenger information, rather than treating them as separate issues. That will no doubt be music to the ears of my hon.”
“Our guidance encourages authorities to take a strategic approach to stops and interchanges, including keeping an inventory of infrastructure, identifying priorities for investment and setting locally appropriate standards for facilities and maintenance.”
“She is absolutely right that the quality of a bus stop is about more than accessibility, although of course accessibility is vital. Passengers notice whether a stop is easy to find and use, whether it offers shelter or seating where appropriate, whether it is clean, whether the surroundings feel safe and well maintained and, as we have di…”
“That approach reflects a simple principle: local transport authorities know their areas and are best placed to plan improvements across the whole local bus network. That is why the Department’s vision for buses, within an integrated transport system, puts local transport authorities at the centre of delivery.”
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“It is consistent with the prioritisation of public health, as has been the case throughout the pandemic. I therefore agree with the approach that John Lewis has taken, which is to treat all its staff the same, regardless of vaccination status. However, the issues play into wider concerns about the totally unacceptable level of support for many of those who have had to self-isolate. From the shockingly low levels of statutory sick pay to the fact that millions of people do not even qualify for it, this is an area where much more could have been done from an early stage of the pandemic. On vaccines, let us be clear that, as many Members have said, having the vaccine is the right thing to do—not just for oneself, but for other people. We thank the NHS staff and the many volunteers who have rolled out the vaccine and the booster jabs.”
“As has been reported over the weekend, businesses of all sizes are debating the vaccine question, and whether to distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated members of their workforce. As has been mentioned, some well-known high street names, such as Morrisons, Next, IKEA and Ocado, have already changed their company’s sickness policies, and will be treating vaccinated and unvaccinated workers differently. That may well be because the rules surrounding isolation for vaccinated and unvaccinated people are different, but there is no general law requiring employees to be vaccinated, nor any law requiring employers to mandate vaccination of their staff. Regardless of whether staff are vaccinated, supporting them to self-isolate is entirely the right approach.”
“Although we see the number of daily infections falling from its peak earlier in the month, it is still at a higher level than we have seen throughout most of the pandemic. Sadly, the number of daily deaths also remains extremely high. This reminds us that the pandemic is not over yet, and it is likely that there will continue to be pressure on the NHS, as well as some level of disruption, due to high levels of staff absences across both the NHS and the wider economy. As we know from the Confederation of British Industry, companies have been struggling with staffing issues for several months, even before the rise in covid cases and the increased levels of absence that that has produced as a result of labour shortages across the economy.”
“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Paisley. I congratulate the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) on his introduction to the debate. As he set out, the petition calls on the Government to make it illegal for any employer to mandate vaccination for its employers, including those in the public sector, the third sector and indeed the private sector. This is a timely debate, coming at the start of the week when the current coronavirus restrictions will be reduced and many people who have been working from home will be planning to return to the office. Employers will also be contemplating how some of the changes, including the removal of the requirement to wear masks, will affect their employees. It will be a period of uncertainty and anxiety for people who are vulnerable.”
“I rise to speak in support of new clause 1, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury). To respond to the previous speaker, the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne), on the issue of ground rents, it is clear that service charges are for communal areas. Indeed, McCarthy Stone’s website says very clearly—”
“Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) promised an outright ban on leasehold houses, and we all hoped that by now a law would be in place for everyone so that these wrongs could be righted. Those people deserve an end to this. They deserve hope that something will finally be done to make their lives a little better. If the Government cannot support the new clause, then, at the very least, I would like to hear from the Dispatch Box a commitment in the form of a final date by which the scourge of leasehold will finally be consigned to the history books. The wronged leaseholders deserve that, and it is about time it happened.”
“In fact, I would love the owner of a set of freeholds to get on the witness stand and try to convince a judge that they are the wronged party in all this. I would love to ask them whether they think people should have the right to live in their own homes without them being used as an income stream for someone else. The irony of what we are debating is that many of those who have done the most to bring the leasehold scandal to the public’s attention—I think in particular of the National Leasehold Campaign—stand to benefit the least from this Bill because there is nothing in it to help existing leaseholders. That is why new clause 1 is so important. Four years ago, when he was Communities Secretary, the right hon.”
“There are parallels, because let us not forget that the victims of leasehold did not sign up to leases in the full knowledge of what they entailed. The developers, lenders and lawyers all have some degree of culpability, but the innocent victims—the leaseholders—do not. The Competition and Markets Authority has been clear on several occasions that leaseholders have been wronged, and I welcome its decisions, but of course those decisions do not cover everyone, which is why we in this place need to step in. We often talk in the House about the plight of the Women Against State Pension Inequality—did the WASPI women not sign up for something very different from what they ended up with? I know there are legal opinions about freeholders’ human rights, but what about my constituents’ human rights?”
“The toxicity of leasehold has now been known for at least five years, which is plenty long enough for any investor to have taken a closer look at what they were involved in, looked for alternative sources of income and realised that nobody with an ounce of humanity should be using people’s homes as an investment vehicle—and especially not ones that included leases that were so onerous they made the homes unsellable. Yes, there is a concern that we should not readily change the law so that it works retrospectively and changes the legal nature of a contract after it has already been entered into, but let us not forget that this place voted to introduce the loan charge, which retrospectively changed the law, arguably to the considerable detriment of many who say they were misled about what they signed up to at the time.”
“That would send out an important signal—not just a departmental press release but a signal that will make a tangible difference to people’s lives: that the days of leasehold are numbered and that this place does not accept that ground rent is a legitimate payment. We see ground rent for what it is: a feudal device used to suck money away from people who get no benefit and no advantage from the payment but risk losing their home if they do not make it. Such arrangements have no place in the 21st century or, indeed, any century. Some say that we should not ban ground rents on existing leases because that would introduce an element of retrospective impact on long-standing investments, including pension funds, but that is not an argument I have any sympathy with.”
“I know that the overturning of a system that has been in place for 1,000 years is not necessarily straightforward, and arguments will always be made as to why things cannot happen, but, as has been said so many times—I have already said it once in this debate myself, but it is worth saying it again and again because it is such a powerful point that can never be made enough—ground rent is a payment made for which absolutely nothing is received in return. Why, then, can we not get on and reduce that payment to effectively nothing so that the legal position reflects the reality of the situation?”
“] He has done a sterling job in this brief, and the new clause is typical of the way he has used every opportunity available to him to push forward the cause for leaseholders. As we know, new clause 1 would not abolish ground rents altogether but, if it is agreed to, will set a timescale by which concrete proposals on their abolition must be put forward. That is important because for too long my constituents and thousands of others have suffered because of the leasehold scandal.”
“Indeed: ground rents are payments for which nothing is received in return, which is why they should be abolished. For the record, I am a co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold and commonhold reform and have campaigned for the abolition of ground rents for a number of years, having seen the impact on individuals of their use and abuse. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale for tabling the new clause and for being a consistently strong advocate for leaseholders during his time as an Opposition spokesperson. He apologised at the start of his speech; I would ask him to resign based on that apology had he not already been moved to another position. [ Laughter.”
“The new clause is obviously not going to find favour with the Minister tonight, but could he at least give us the date—maybe even just the year—by which leasehold will finally be in the history books?”
“It feels at times as if progress is painfully slow, but that should not dim our determination finally to consign leasehold to the dustbin.”
“People who buy a home should have a right not to expect it to become an ongoing income stream for a third party. If we have that as our guiding principle we will not go far wrong, so let us crack on with legislating so that that can become a reality for everyone. As many Members have done, I want to acknowledge the fantastic work of the many campaigners who have been active in bringing this issue to the fore including, as we have heard, the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, Martin Boyd, Sebastian O’Kelly, the late Louie Burns, the National Leasehold Campaign, Catherine Williams, Katie Kendrick, Jo Darbyshire and many others, with the Father of the House being one of the biggest cheerleaders. There are many people who have contributed to bringing the issue to the attention of the House, but there is much more that we need to do.”
“I am a little concerned that the companies on which we rely to build the houses that we need are responsible for many of the injustices that we have discussed tonight. We need to keep a close eye on their practices in future. I still think that we need an inquiry into the whole industry. We have previously discussed some of the things that we touched on tonight, and the question of how close lawyers were to developers and whether they were acting in the best interests of their clients needs further examination. We need to look at the lenders and surveyors and what the developers were saying to people, often first-time buyers, who were misled about what they were buying. We need to make sure that the system is examined thoroughly so that there is no repeat of the scandal that we have seen over the past five years.”
“That will just add more weight to the sense of injustice that existing leaseholders feel, which is why I am so keen for us to push on and deal with that issue. As many Members have said, a lot more needs to be done. A whole range of issues have been mentioned tonight. We have, for example, barely touched on park homes. There are so many scandalous things going on there, and we really should be paying them more attention. For homeowners, we see the following: management fees, which are a rip-off; non-transparent service charges; the cost of enfranchisement; insurance scams; obscure penalty clauses; and other costs that appear everywhere we turn in a lease. They are all baked into the business models of those avaricious companies which, let us not forget, are still out there building houses.”
“It is also worth commenting on the fact that one in three houses sold in the north-west in the past 10 years is leasehold. There has been much talk about levelling up. Who can doubt that a person’s home is the biggest investment they will make? So it is simply unacceptable for so many homes in my part of the world to have been built off the back of an exploitative and unjust business model. Surely, if levelling up is to mean anything, it should at the very least mean that people’s homes are owned on the same basis wherever they live in the country. The ending of ground rents for new homes is a positive, but it will create a strange situation. There will be houses within a stone’s throw of one another that have a different form of ownership.”
“It is a pleasure, as always, to follow the Father of the House. As we have already mentioned this evening, we are now four years on from the promises that were made about reforming leasehold, and the Bill, as we have all accepted, is a step in the right direction. However, as we have all acknowledged as well, it is little comfort to those who are still trapped in homes that they cannot sell because of the onerous leases with which they have been left, and we must do something about that. I tried to get the Minister to give us a year when that might happen, but we could not get anything out of him. None the less, I can assure him and the House that we will keep pushing on the issue, because justice demands that it is resolved.”
“As always, I find myself in agreement with the Father of the House. Whistleblowers should be able to speak up freely. With my other hat on, it is probably time that we had a review of whistleblowing legislation to make sure that people are adequately protected. We owe a debt to people who are prepared to speak up and put their head above the parapet, possibly at great personal expense. The scams have to be stopped, and people need to be supported. On that note, we have made a little progress tonight, and I want to keep making progress. I am sure that the majority of the House will want leasehold finally to enter the history books, rather than being something that we deal with on a day-to-day basis.”
“Are the Government content for this scandal to continue? If they are, they should step aside and let a Government in that will actually do something about it. In conclusion, I hope that when the Minister responds he can tell us whether the Government have any intention of implementing the 40-odd outstanding recommendations from Taylor. Will he also tell us whether we should take the removal of the employment Bill from the Queen’s Speech as an indication that the Government have downgraded the importance of workers’ rights? If he disagrees with that analysis, can he at least give us a date by which he expects all the outstanding recommendations from Taylor to be implemented? We have had enough of the rhetoric. It is time for some action.”
“A Labour Government would tackle the problems that we have talked about through our Green Paper, which explains a fantastic vision of how we would create protection, stability and fairness, and would legally redefine the work relationship by getting rid of qualifying periods before rights kick in. A Labour Government would give all workers equal rights on day one and ban zero-hours contracts so that every worker gets a guaranteed number of hours each week with an on-call payment for the hours the employer might want the employee to work. A Labour Government would create a presumption, as we have heard, that everyone will be a worker unless they are clearly self-employed. We would see an end to the gaming of the system by tech-savvy companies who have exploitation baked into their business models, which have grown and grown.”
“How can people plan for the future if the labour market is so parasitic that it takes everything just to keep their heads above water, and if they are always fearful of what the day will bring because they are just one mishap away from disaster? “Rights” is not a dirty word. Rights are about individual dignity and respect in the workplace. They bring important social and economic benefits for the whole country, as well as for the individual. They give people a stake in society, knowing that if they do a good job, and if their employer runs the business well, they will be rewarded with a good wage, decent working conditions and job security. Labour’s vision is of a country where everyone has security, prosperity and respect, especially in the workplace.”
“There was an initial enthusiasm but that has waned, and waned, and waned.” He said that nearly a year ago, and not a lot has happened since then, so it is hardly a glowing recommendation. Perhaps that is why the Government dragged their feet for nearly a year to appoint a replacement. Can the Minister explain why it took so long to replace him? What about fire and rehire? How on earth can we still be talking about that now? The fact that the Government blocked the private Member’s Bill on that was an absolute disgrace and sums up a wider attitude to workplace justice. It will need, as it always does, a Labour Government to introduce the real reform that is needed to undo the damage of years of inaction that has allowed exploitative work models to go unchecked.”
“Recent data from the Office for National Statistics shows that approximately one million workers are on zero-hours contracts. It also revealed that workers feel underemployed, often have to work more than one job and are constantly searching for new work, with over a third of zero-hours workers having been in their current jobs for less than 12 months. The cycle of perpetual insecurity is bad not only for workers, but for the wider economy. Let us consider what the Government’ s former employment tsar, Matthew Taylor, said about the Government’s progress, which is pretty damning. Last February, nearly a year ago now, he said: “We have seen a gradual but unmistakable deceleration of the government reform agenda in relation to good work.”
“At the heart of the Government response has been a false understanding that there must always be a trade-off between security and flexibility. Many self-employed people enjoy that flexibility, although those who proclaim the virtue of the arrangement are often directly employed themselves, usually at a senior level. For many, flexibility comes at the cost of security. It cannot be right that in 2022 people are worried about the consequences of falling ill and whether they should go into work if they are unwell. The truth is that the Government have allowed the exploitative work model to grow unchecked. The Government’s own data demonstrates the scale of the problem. The hon. Member for Leicester East (Claudia Webbe) spoke about zero-hours contracts.”
“As various Members mentioned, the 2019 Queen’s Speech had the promise of an employment Bill, which we would have expected to deal with many of the remaining recommendations in the Taylor review. As has been mentioned several times, there was no such promise in the 2021 Queen’s Speech. Does that represent a downgrading of the Government’s commitment to tackle the issue? Why go to all the trouble of commissioning the review and then not doing anything about it? Surely, a Government committed to improving rights at work want to do that at the earliest opportunity. Sadly, this is yet more evidence, if we needed it, that improving workers’ rights has never been, and will never be, a priority for a Conservative Government. The rise of the gig economy has been one of hallmarks of the era of austerity.”
“Imagine how anxious people must be living with that uncertainty every single day, because of that working arrangement. I want to pick up on what the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) said. I thank her for being the one Conservative Back Bencher here today. She obviously has an interest in this area, and we welcome that. She was right to say that the pandemic has preoccupied much of the Government’s time, which might be a reason why we have not had legislation. However, in the last two years 64 Acts of Parliament have been put on the statute book, as well as over 2,300 statutory instruments, so it is a question of priority. I agree with her that workplace discrimination, which was not covered by the Taylor review, needs an awful lot more attention.”
“My hon. Friend was right when he said that the pandemic shows the Government’s central role in improving workplace conditions. He was also right to mention the cuts to the Health and Safety Executive over the past decade, during austerity, and how the conviction rate for workplace infractions has gone down by 66%. Workplaces have certainly not become 66% safer in the last five years, so that shows where this Government’s priorities lie. We also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), who again knows more about this than many. He made an important point about the human side of this, and the dehumanising experience of people waiting for a text in the morning to know whether they are actually going to be in work, get paid and be able to put food on the table.”
“I completely agree with him that trade union membership has been shown, time and again, to improve pay and working conditions. I know many of my constituents still benefit from good pay and working conditions as a result of his work as a trade union leader. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) for the fantastic work he has done on our Green Paper. It is a real pleasure to be able to take over a brief and have such a great set of policies already in place. He was right to mention the single status of workers as being a key part of that. That will transform the lives of millions of people. If the Minister wants to work with us to try to get that on the statute book as soon as possible, we are more than willing to discuss that because it is a game changer, far more than anything in the Taylor review.”
“He was also right to raise the scandal of SSP being at one of the lowest levels in Europe. People should not be forced to choose between going in to work and financial hardship as a result of health conditions. He said that work should be fulfilling, paid fairly and with adequate benefits. Those are all things that we would like to see in any Bill or Green Paper that comes forward from the Government. We also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum). She made the important point that black, Asian and minority ethnic workers are often in these insecure jobs. Has the Minister undertaken any assessments of the impact of gig-economy working on those groups? My hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) spoke very well. He knows more about this than most.”
“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair this morning, Mrs Cummins. I start by referring to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests regarding trade union membership. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) for securing today’s debate and for his brilliant introduction. He quoted the TUC saying that Taylor was not the game changer it wanted, and we certainly agree with that. It goes nowhere near enough to tackle the workplace injustices that we have talked about today, but at least it was a step in the right direction. For it to be left on the shelf is simply not good enough. I agree with my hon. Friend that the quality of work is as important as the quantity. That we have millions of people trapped in low-paid and insecure work, living in poverty, is not something the Government should be proud of.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; he is getting intervened on a lot this morning, which shows the level of interest. His comments on how work has changed during the pandemic are interesting. It is true that people have been working from home for years and years—it is just that there has been a lot more of it. What we want from the Minister is a date by which the rest of the recommendations will be implemented.”
“I acknowledge that this will not be a priority for local authorities, with their stretched funds, but I know that this is not an isolated example and the pattern is being repeated across the country. Pupils have had enough disruption to their education during the last couple of years, so I would not want them to have to change schools because travel to the school of their choice has become unaffordable. Can the Minister comment on any assessment he has made on the cost and availability of home-to-school transport? That chimes with what my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead said earlier about the paucity of bus services in the area, and the need for places like Merseyside and Cheshire to be given the powers, rules and resources to take back control of their bus networks. That is something I think we would all want to see.”
“Can the Minister enlighten me as to the reasons why it was turned down? The suspicion that we have seen in other areas is that decisions are being made on a party political basis, and not on the merits of the application. Will the Minister advise when there will be an opportunity to submit a further application? The problems that that station would solve are only going to increase. Finally, I want to mention the crisis in school transport, which particularly affects my constituents travelling to schools on the Wirral. Driver shortages and increased fuel costs mean that some services are being pulled all together, or only offered on a termly basis, at a price that few can afford. As the schools are outside the catchment area, there is no financial support available.”
“The cost of a ticket into Liverpool from Little Sutton is 30% more expensive than from a station just two stops further down the line, and three times as much as it would cost for a similar journey in London. I do not understand why those price differentials exist, and I would be grateful if the Minister could provide an answer as to why prices are so much more expensive for my constituents, or at least commit to looking into that. There has been a 20-year campaign for a station at Ledsham, in Little Sutton, which was submitted to the railway renewal fund, but sadly rejected. The overall comment that the Department made was that it was “a strong proposal with a well-articulated narrative on how the project could unlock growth opportunities in the area.” It puzzles me somewhat that the application was rejected.”
“Surely, as the peak morning service, this is the last journey that should be cut. We are waiting for answers about this from the current operator, but when the Minister responds I hope he can say when we can get the half-hourly service that was specifically promised in the franchise agreement. Ultimately, passengers on this line need an end to the need to change at Bidston, and to get the direct line to Liverpool installed. That would deliver the true connectivity that we need in Neston. My constituents in Ellesmere Port, on the other side of the constituency, already have a half-hourly service to Liverpool, although the price of tickets is an issue. We all know the cost of rail travel is going up, and indeed the cost of everything else is going up, but we seem to be paying more than others.”
“What I will say is that we are now coming up to seven years since the then Chancellor George Osborne promised my constituents that they would not have to pay a fee to cross the bridge at Runcorn. Will the Minister tell us when that promise will be kept? Constituents of mine travelling by train have a similar experience at the moment, as the Wrexham to Bidston line is operating a reduced service due to short staffing, which is understandable. For my constituents in Neston, that is the only route by public transport into Liverpool. We were expecting a half-hourly service by now, but the pandemic seems to have delayed that. The current service runs once every two hours, which hopefully will be put right shortly, but it seems extraordinary to me that the 7.10 am and the 9.10 am train have survived, but the 8.10 am train has been cancelled.”
“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Robertson. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) for securing this important debate. Although my constituency is in Cheshire, we are very much in the hinterland of Merseyside. We are less than 10 miles away from Liverpool city centre, and our economic, educational, cultural and family connections mean that there are many people travelling across Merseyside on a daily basis. Sadly, it seems that we are an afterthought, suffering poorer services and higher costs. I will not repeat the legitimate arguments made by my constituents about the two-tier charging system they face when they cross the River Mersey in their car through the tunnel or the over the bridge.”
“As a co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold and commonhold reform, I pay tribute to all the campaigners up and down the country who have done a sterling job at keeping this issue on the political agenda. They will certainly welcome the principle, set out in the statement, that innocent leaseholders must not shoulder the burden. I hope that applies equally—not just to cladding, but to any other fire safety defects and to the cost of the interim safety measures that have been necessary. The Secretary of State recognised that in the statement by referring to the extra £27 million for waking watches, but leaseholders will have already paid out thousands of pounds for waking watches. Should they now expect some reimbursement for those costs?”
“The hon. Gentleman makes a particularly important point about affordable housing. I am often told that developers who make such arguments about viability are working on a 20% profit margin per property. Does he agree that that is completely unsustainable?”
“How about a fit and proper person test for the directors of those companies? In conclusion, I would like much greater political direction and oversight of the house building industry. After all, it will build the homes that we need, but at the moment it quite understandably organises affairs to maximise profits. Housing is a critical part of our infrastructure—having a roof over one’s head is fundamental—but it has been shown time and again that we cannot rely on the market alone to deliver that. Four and a half years on from Grenfell, we still have not really had a decision on who is liable for the defects that were created there, and there is clearly a reluctance in Government to grasp the nettle and take some ownership of the industry.”
“There needs to be far greater accountability for what developers say and what they build. At the moment, they seem to have a free pass. Developers with household names work across the country, moving from one project to the next, sometimes leaving behind problems that take years to resolve. Another development in my constituency has ended up in court, with one group of residents pitted against another and maintenance bills racking up in their thousands, because the developers did not do the paperwork or the job properly in the first place. I know that they are causing havoc elsewhere, because other hon. Members have told me. What can councils do? They have no grounds to refuse planning permission on the basis that the developer has been a poor performer elsewhere.”
“What developers say to new buyers in the showroom and what is in the final contract are often very different. By the time the paperwork arrives, it is too late. People may have spent thousands on the move, never mind the psychological commitment they have made. What is said in the showroom often does not appear in any documentation. There is a classic example in my constituency where residents now look out on a 30-feet-high warehouse, which the developers conveniently forgot to mention already had planning permission when they sold buyers their homes. They are still waiting for the KFC that they were told was going to be there. Because that is just sales patter, there is no legal accountability for the lies that are told. This is the biggest single purchase people will ever make.”
“House builders build houses—that is their core business; they are not interested in managing estates. Indeed, they cannot wait to get rid of them to a company that specialises in such things. Developers creating an estate management company is nothing more than a calculation on the balance sheet. They have zero interest in keeping the verges neat and tidy after they have gone. If they can make the bottom line look more attractive by getting in a management company, they will. They keep getting away with it because we let them. Why can we not start from the basic principle that the local council should be doing those jobs and that estate management companies are an unnecessary tax on homeowners? How many people are told of the implications of an estate management company or how much it costs?”
“This reduces developers’ costs, although it does not seem to lead to cheaper house prices. It costs the homeowner far more in the long run because they are, in effect, paying twice for the maintenance of open spaces: once through a management fee and once through their council tax. Once again, though, it is the council that gets lumbered with all the grief and blame. With developers looking to replace their lost funding streams, with what I hope will be the end of leasehold, I am concerned that estate management companies will become the new payment protection insurance of the house building industry. There is little regulation or transparency and, if we are honest, little need for estate management companies in most settings, so why do we have them?”
“It might not look much on a plan, but for someone living next door, a couple of metres makes a huge difference. What about roads being brought up to an acceptable standard, so that they can be adopted by the local authority? People are waiting years for roads to be adopted. I do not blame the local authority, which sets out what needs to be done but does not have the resources or time to continually chase developers who have sold the homes and moved on. Where is the incentive for developers to come back and finish the job they started? I want to say a few words about the massive expansion of estate management companies. It seems that the idea of the developer paying the local authority a commuted sum to cut the grass and maintain common parts has had its day.”
“In my experience, developers all too often show contempt for local communities by riding roughshod over the development conditions imposed on them: working longer hours, making more noise, and building higher and closer than they should to existing properties. That creates more work for the beleaguered planning department and puts more demands on councils that, after a decade of austerity, simply do not have the powers and resources to keep up. By the time the council manages to catch up with a complaint, quite often the house is already built and the drains put in. It is a massive financial, logistical and legal battle to get developers to stick to plans when they have got that far down the road. Many councils simply do not have the capacity to get into such fights, especially when the case is about a couple of metres.”
“In reality, they and the communities they represent have limited say over what sort of homes are built, where they are built and, as the hon. Member for Wantage mentioned, how the infrastructure that goes with them is delivered. That is the nub of the problem, because we are often told that the wrong type of home is being built in the wrong type of place. That can be argued ad infinitum, and it often is. The bottom line is that we are continually falling short in achieving enough decent affordable housing. Decent housing is critical to the national infrastructure. It is the bedrock of people’s lives, yet it is too often left to the market to resolve, and the market is clearly failing.”