Alistair Strathern

I know that pulses have been racing all day in Westminster, but the moment is finally here: we come to tonight’s Adjournment debate on unadopted housing estates. The House may not be quite as packed as the other House was for the speech His Majesty gave earlier, but I think we have some of the best of the bunch of hon. Members from right across the Chamber here, including my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller). Protocol prevents him from intervening today, but I know that he has been dealing with a lot of these issues in his constituency, too. I am very proud to be standing here as a member of a party that is committed to taking on so many of the big structural housing challenges facing communities right across the UK. We are committed to tackling the undersupply of homes, breaking down the barriers to better protection for renters, and doing more to liberate leaseholders from the feudal system that they are trapped in. It is really important that we meet the mark on unadopted estates—the topic of this debate—even if the issue does not always catch the same headlines as those other issues. The problem has been growing and growing. It arises when housing developers and local authorities fail to ensure that adequate measures are taken to adopt the roads and public amenities on new-build estates, which are being built across the country and have been over recent decades. It used to be typical that 5% to 10% of housing stock would be subject to this issue, having perhaps been marketed as a premium product, but recent research from the Home Builders Federation shows that over the last three years, 90% of estates were not adopted. What had been a marginal part of the system has, as a result of local authority cuts and developers sometimes looking to profiteer off the back of their new homeowners, become a much more endemic problem. That is an issue for so many reasons. First and foremost, it means that those new homeowners—90% of new homeowners on estates built over the least three years—are essentially paying a new-home stealth tax. They are on the hook to estate management companies. They often pay hundreds of pounds in maintenance fees for services that other residents would receive by paying their council tax alone.