Size Matters!

Congratulations HorNets! We have reached over 10,000 supporters in our FaceBook group.

This not only shows how many people support our campaign to abolish privately managed estates in favour of adoption by councils, but gives an indicator of the size of the problem nationally.

If we want a change in the law, we need to demonstrate a large number of people are disadvantaged by the current system.

The bottom line is that estate dwellers regardless of tenure end up footing the bill for maintaining cheaply constructed estate infrastructure, sub standard for adoption. Developers maximise profit at the consumers expense.

Who knows the size of this rapidly growing problem? Neither the government nor the local authorities are counting, so we are in our own small way and now have a good representative sample of C800 estates.

The government do count completed dwellings and from their statistics we find that between the start of 2001 and the end of 2021, 3009750 dwelling were completed – yes that’s over 3M! If we accept that private estates were not universal near the beginning of that time span and not all dwellings are on estates we could round it down to 3 million. Three million disadvantaged!

From our own data we have 677 estates with clear information on estate charges per home per annum and the average is £273. We began collecting this data over 5 years ago, so this is almost certainly below the current figure.

However we could use it to get a feel for the size of the “industry”. 3 x 273 = 819. We calculate that managing agents are collecting £819 million per year in estate charges. Little wonder there is resistance to change.

Let’s make 2023 the year we work together using this data to create change!