Alistair Strathern

Absolutely. The certainty and fairness my hon. Friend calls for is the bare minimum we should expect for our constituents and the bare minimum that families should have when moving into a new property, often one they have saved up for over a long time to take that big, exciting step. I know his constituents will be all the better for the work he has done to champion that, but it should not fall to him and other hon. Members to fight for this. It should be a matter of course for new developments. That inequity I was talking about is a real challenge. Not only is it unfair that lots of our constituents are having to pay hundreds of pounds—and often much more than that—each year for services that others receive as standard, but the very nature of fleecehold is designed to structurally inflate some of those costs. Those management companies are very rarely accountable to the actual residents of these new estates that they in theory provide services for. As a result, there is no incentive for them to keep costs low; I have had examples of people having to pay more than £250 per household just to fix a single lightbulb on the estate. Constituents are individually on the hook for thousands of pounds across the estate as a result of road challenges, and there are many more examples of no real pressure or accountability for the costs residents have to pay. Alongside that, the complicated legal nature of those structures, the professional fees involved, and the fact that certain estates can be subdivided into tiny blocks or pockets of five homes—each of which has to have its own management company and therefore has to pay for all those professional services over and over again—mean that a large chunk of those fees often does not go towards any service at all. It simply covers professional fees, auditing costs, and wider costs associated with a structure that is by its very essence deeply inefficient and not set up to provide a service to the residents who rely on it.