Category: The Buzz

Thanks to all who have written to the Competition and Markets Authority in response to their working paper – we gave it our best shot.

Below is a link to our email on behalf of the group – you may think the language is quite moderate, but the Competition and Markets Authority have worked hard, listened, investigated and they got it. They have correctly identified that lack of adoption is the underlying problem on publicly accessible estates.

We had thought it would be a matter now of waiting for their recommendations in February, but lo and behold, the government has, after 4 years, suddenly found parliamentary time to introduce its Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill! It feels like a race to get something on the statute book now regardless of whether the act will deliver anything like the changes needed for either leasehold or estate charges to ensure fairness to home/lease buyers. In our view both should be abolished, not polished.

For us, the fundamental mistake (??) government makes is to look to ensure parity between leaseholders and estate charge payers. A dodge which means we will be treated like leaseholders – big deal! Actually it’s a smack in the eye, as it legitimises a model which should be scrapped. We seek parity with other home buyers, not leaseholders who are an even more disadvantaged group than us.

We do not want or need estate charges on developments open to the public. They may be appropriate on gated private estates, but this is not the case for us.

If the government think they can catch any votes with this bill they have another think coming. Like so many government actions, it supports big business, not the voting public.

We are working with the NLC to pull together a way forward and will post again soon on this.

Our campaign to abolish private management of public areas/amenities on new build estates has been going now for 7 years. During that time we have had 8 housing ministers, a private members bill and numerous press articles, mostly on regional networks. There have been some promises from the government which have stood for 4 years without action. Since these only covered regulating an existing exploitative system we feel perhaps this has been a blessing in disguise as the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) have stepped in with a Market Study which is looking at private estate management as part of its work. The study began in March and a progress report has just (25/08/23) been posted along with a press release. They are now looking at investigating the area in greater depth. This is hopeful news and we are confident that they will find anticompetitive practices which impact adversely on many new build home buyers. Thanks to all HorNet supporters have worked hard to submit evidence to the CMA. Also thank you NLC (National Leasehold Campaign) – we know you raise the issue of estate charges whenever the opportunity arises.

The CMA are considering looking into private estate management via their more formal in depth legal process (Market Investigation Referral) and we feel we should encourage them to do so as it looks to see if competition law has been broken. This may be the only way current victims could ultimately get compensated for their predicament . The down side is time – another 18 months plus, but we hope it would be worth it. Our understanding is that it wouldn’t necessarily preclude the CMA from making recommendations to the government for policy changes which could stop current practices in future. To take a look at their August 25th Update click here. It’s worth spending some time reading this 70 page document – the section near the end gives more explanation of the measures they can take.

Continue reading “A Ray of Light from the CMA”

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!