Unadopted Estates and Roads

Alex Norris Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Alex Norris)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) on securing this important debate, which is characteristic of the type of issues that he champions. I do not think this issue gets nearly enough coverage, and it is great that we have the opportunity to debate it this morning. It is one of those issues that, exactly as he says, turns dreams into nightmares and can ruin people’s lives or make people’s lives just that bit harder. It is exactly the sort of issue that he is passionate about and that he always uses his platform to raise, and I am grateful that he has. I am also grateful for other colleagues’ contributions.

I am grateful not just for my hon. Friend’s excellent diagnosis of the problem, but for charitably offering solutions to the Government. I am also grateful to him for raising these issues in his ten-minute rule Bill, which is a good way for Members of Parliament to raise issues with the Government and to hear our policy ideas. I make it clear that we support the underlying goals of his Bill, which aligns very nicely with our manifesto commitment to end the injustice of fleecehold estates.

It is important to recognise that, yes, this is an issue for my hon. Friend’s constituents, but we are also seeing it across the country. From Ebbsfleet up to Stockton and, in the middle, South Derbyshire—so good that it is nearly Nottingham—residents are facing these growing challenges, and we must be there to support them.

As the Minister with responsibility for building safety, I often say that in my area, and across Government more generally, we are trying to serve twin moral imperatives. The first is to make sure that people have a home. I think every day of the 6,000 children in bed-and-breakfast accommodation and the 180,000 children in temporary accommodation the previous night. We have to make sure that people have homes, but we also have to ensure that they are good homes and that, exactly as my hon. Friend says, we are not setting up people to fail. We have to make sure those homes are warm and dry, safe from fire and, in this case, do not come with overheads or lower-quality infrastructure that make owning, renting or living in that home a nightmare and a battle. Those are the Government’s goals, and they are perfectly compatible

Exactly as my hon. Friend says, this issue has an impact on both supply and local authority budgets, so it is right that we take our time to assemble the best available evidence to make sure that we get the best possible change, but we appreciate that we need to get on and move at pace.

I will start close to where my hon. Friend finished, with the Competition and Markets Authority’s study of house building. The study was published last year and provides evidence for what I suspect we already knew from our constituency mailbags—over the past few years, we have seen significant growth in the number of unadopted estates. The study talks about some of the causes behind that trend, concluding that this practice is detrimental to consumers.

The Government agree with the CMA’s conclusion that, overall, the house building market is not delivering for consumers and has consistently failed to do so over successive decades. We have looked very closely at the report’s recommendations, which call for measures to strengthen protection for existing homeowners and for the Government to mandate adoption of all new estates and implement common adoptable standards for infrastructure on those new estates. We accepted many of the recommendations last October, but we believe that further work is required in some areas—I will talk a little about that. I take to heart what my hon. Friends the Members for Hitchin and for Dartford (Jim Dickson) said about the importance of certainty and fairness, which are absent from this process. Without them, people cannot build their lives properly.

Ms Butler, you will not be surprised to hear me say that, as it so often does, this starts with individual rights—residents’ rights on unadopted housing estates. As we have heard, residents living on privately managed estates with unadopted amenities are struggling with a range of problems, including poor service, excessive bills and limited to no transparency about how money is spent, onerous restrictions on the title deeds to their properties—my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin raised a particularly egregious case—and a general lack of control over how the estate is managed. That speaks to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire.

The CMA found that approximately 20% of freehold estates have what is known as an embedded management company set in the title deeds. It found that residents may find it extremely hard—indeed, sometimes impossible —to remove or change an embedded management company, no matter what quality of service they receive. Of course, that cannot be right. My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin talked about a lack of accountability. Well, what could be a greater lack of accountability?

In the spirit of urgency that my hon. Friend talked about, in the immediate term we need to introduce protections for residential freeholders on already-constructed freehold estates. As hon. Members may be aware, the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, passed by the previous Parliament, created a regulatory framework that will provide for exactly the sorts of protections and rights to which my hon. Friend referred. It provides for standardised demands, an annual report, a right for homeowners to challenge the reasonableness of charges levied, a requirement for estate managers to consult homeowners where the anticipated cost exceeds an appropriate amount, and a right for residential freeholders to apply to a tribunal to appoint a manager in the event of serious management failure. That is the prize before us.

As the Minister for Housing and Planning, my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), made clear in his written ministerial statement last November, we need to act as quickly as feasible to implement those provisions, but they need to be enacted with detailed secondary legislation. We want to get this right, not least because these are, at their heart, extremely technical matters, and the last thing we want to do is give hope by promising change, and for the change not to deliver because it was not operable or effective. We will bring these measures into effect as soon as possible, but we first need to consult on the technical detail. We will publish the consultation document later this year. My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin said that we need real pace, and my hon. Friend the Housing Minister and I have heard that strongly.

More broadly, at the heart of this, having the choice of a managing agent is really important, whether for unadopted estates or buildings in which lots of people live together. Sometimes residents step up—who knows their community better than they do?—but those are hard jobs. I have met many resident management companies in the course of my work, and there is an awful lot for them to step up and do. That is why there are sometimes frustrations. We agreed with what the CMA said about RMCs needing the right guidance and support to do the job themselves, where they choose to do so.

We also know that for many buildings or estates, there will be a really important role for managing agents. When done well, managing agents are an important part of enhancing communities and individual lives. Where that is not the case—too often, it is not—they can have all the detrimental impacts we have heard about. That is why the Government are so committed to strengthening the regulation of managing agents of leasehold properties and estate managers of freehold estates. We believe that, at a minimum, there should be mandatory professional qualifications for managing agents, whether they manage a building or an estate. We will consult on that measure later this year. That is an important part of driving up standards in the industry to make sure that all managing agents are making the positive contribution that we know they want to make, and that they should and can make when done well.

The point on adoption is often around the quality of infrastructure. Local authorities have significant challenges, and nobody expects new builds to add more burden—certainly not through the provision of poor housing or the infrastructure that supports it. Traditionally, without the challenges we see today, local authorities and water companies would adopt those respective parts of a new residential estate, whether it be the roads, the drains or the sewers, and they would set clear standards and provide oversight to ensure these were delivered to adoptable standards. Where that has not been the case, the responsibility for ongoing maintenance falls on the residents. For some on the adoption journey, which in many cases can take more than a decade because of these ongoing concerns, they pick up the bill with no resolution in sight—they live in that twilight zone.

We are conscious that, at the heart of this, developers have to build to a good standard. Otherwise there is poorer infrastructure and a lack of adoptability, never mind the lack of redress for homeowners and the lack of oversight. There are too many examples where developments have been left unfinished for years, and we do not think homeowners should be left in that limbo.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin talks about complexity, and we will have more complex schemes with different ownerships, tenures and types—we want that as a Government—but that will add a degree of complexity. Similarly, there are greater expectations on developers, for good reasons. Whether it is sustainable drainage systems, biodiversity net gain, electric vehicle charging points, playgrounds or sports pitches, they all make this more challenging, which is why the clarity on standards that we intend to set from the centre is so important.

My hon. Friend has made a powerful case, which has been reflected strongly in the interventions from colleagues and in the mailbags of all hon. and right hon. Members. I am grateful that he has given them this hearing. It is vital that we take on this issue in the round to make sure that we get it right and secure a change that delivers for people. That is why we will seek views from a wide range of parties, including local authorities, management companies, developers and, crucially, freeholders and residents. I hope colleagues will help to bring the voices of their constituents into the consultations.

I make it clear that we intend to act. There is a clear commitment to act, and we have a legislative framework to do so. We will see action in this area. We want to move at the best pace that we can, and we know at the heart of this issue is a significant prize: improving the lives of many people across the country. We are very committed to doing so.

Question put and agreed to.