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Leaseholders' Rights Bill

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I promise that I am not planning to speak until he gets back—that would be totally unfair and would certainly take credit away from the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Gillingham (Paul Clark), for his marathon. I hope that we will still be discussing the matter, because I know that the hon. Gentleman has serious experience and expertise to contribute to the debate. As I said, I have been aware of leaseholders' problems for many years. In my original constituency of Hastings and Rye, we dealt with the difficulties that private sector leaseholders had. Over the years, we have managed to give them the right to consultation and to get their own quotes for works. Although the system is by no means perfect, private sector leaseholders, if they have the will to do so, can manage their own blocks and properties properly and to their benefit. However, that is not true in the public sector. When I talked to my predecessor as MP for Beckenham, he briefed me about the difficulties of his public sector leaseholders, who have become my public sector leaseholders. As I have said, Broomleigh, the local large registered social landlord that took over Bromley's council housing, took over some public sector leaseholders with it. Practically the first thing that I had to do as the MP for Beckenham was try to sort out the difficulties that those leaseholders were having, such as enforced contractors, a lack of consultation on the repairs that had to be done and very little option in the repayment of substantial sums. Many people felt that they had no input into their contracts and that they were badly managed. Broomleigh is a very good housing association and picked up on those problems. It created a leaseholder unit and started to put in place the procedures that I wish to introduce under the Bill. The issue then died away, however, and the leaseholder unit was disbanded. There was then another problem, about bay windows in blocks of flats. It reignited all the problems about the lack of consultation, the lack of the right to bring forward other contracts, and leaseholders having no control over costs and little control over payment, with huge bills and demands for instant payment. I am glad to say that Broomleigh then resuscitated the leaseholder unit. Although people were still unhappy and there were flaws in the process, we are beginning to see a much more sophisticated understanding from Broomleigh of how to manage a block of mixed tenure, where there are public sector leaseholders who react differently from tenants when faced with repairs. However, that best practice—at least, it is getting towards best practice—has not been copied by many councils or by other RSLs. My Bill would give public sector leaseholders the right to consultation, to get quotes from other contractors for work that needs to be done and to have a wide variety of repayment methods to ensure that bills are paid. Public sector leaseholders recognise that their properties have to be maintained, so there is the will to contribute to maintenance and repairs. What particularly irritates them is that they are unable to contribute to the process by which those repairs are carried out. They have no right to monitor whether they are carried out well, and demands for money come without a by-your-leave. They can see how inefficiently many contracts are managed. Over the years, because of my interest in the matter, I have had contact with a wide variety of public sector leaseholder organisations. There was one meeting, probably the largest public meeting that I can remember, with public sector leaseholders in Tower Hamlets. They were incandescent with rage about how the council was dealing with their leases. Since I published the Bill, I have been contacted by leaseholders in Camden, Westminster and Islington. I have notified the hon. Members for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) about the Bill and the fact that I would be mentioning leaseholders in their constituencies. I know that both have worked hard on behalf of public sector leaseholders. What has caused more difficulties than anything else is the sheer size of the bills that public sector leaseholders are asked to contribute to. Not all, but a lot, of the work has been driven by the decent homes standard. None of us would say that it was wrong to bring that in, but the problem is that most RSLs—I use that term to include both councils and housing associations, because we will be here even longer if I have to explain that each time—treat public sector leaseholders as though they were tenants. They also overload bills with management costs and a whole variety of other expenses that they think they can get away with.