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

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, if he will make it his policy to prescribe a requirement to clearly communicate (a) estate fees and (b) service charges to home buyers in future legislative proposals for leasehold reform.

The Government is committed to promoting fairness and transparency for homeowners and ensuring that consumers are protected from abuse and poor service. We have already committed to setting a fee and timescale for the provision of leasehold information when a home is being sold. This will require freeholders, or managing agents acting on their behalf, to provide relevant information including details of service charges. We will bring forward these proposals as soon as parliamentary time allows.

Furthermore, as set out in the Levelling Up White Paper, the UK Government and the industry will work together to ensure the critical material information buyers of leasehold and freehold properties need to know - like tenure type, lease length and any service charges - are available digitally wherever possible from trusted and authenticated sources, and provided only once.

Where people pay estate rent charges it is not appropriate that these homeowners have limited rights to challenge these costs. That is why the Government intends to legislate to ensure that the charges that resident freeholders may pay towards the maintenance of communal area are fairer and more transparent.

The Government established an independent working group, chaired by Lord Best, to raise standards across the property sector, which also considered how fees such as service charges should be presented to consumers. The working group published its final report to Government (see: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulation-of-property-agents-working-group-report) and we are considering the report's recommendations.