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Land Maintenance Companies

I shall be delighted to help my hon. Friend to deal with the company and its performance and behaviour. Some major developers, such as Bryant Homes, Gladedale, Persimmon, and Wimpey, are transferring ownership of open spaces and the sole right to manage them to a single private provider: Greenbelt Group Ltd. Developers are awarding Greenbelt the exclusive right for all time to charge home owners for managing open spaces on new estates. Home owners are bound by conditions in the title deeds to pay the company an annual fee for maintaining open spaces on estates. In some cases, that payment is nearly £400 a year. In return, Greenbelt is obliged to look after open spaces to the standards outlined in the title deeds. However, emerging evidence shows that the company is failing to meet its obligations on many estates. Greenbelt claims to manage various estates throughout the UK—I shall return to the number—but at least 11 are in my constituency, and constituents on every one of those estates are reporting problems. They tell me that Greenbelt continually fails to carry out maintenance work to the standard outlined in the title deeds. Greenbelt is extremely difficult to engage with, and complaints have been dismissed or ignored. The company’s management practices are poor.