Justin Madders MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2026 · Commonhold and Leasehold Reform: Managing Agents · Hansard source

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  I start by referring the Chamber to my chairmanship of the leasehold and commonhold reform APPG, where I work closely with organisations such as the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership and the National Leasehold Campaign, to which I pay tribute. As we have heard, complaints from constituents about management companies and the exorbitant fees they charge are something that we all deal with on a weekly basis. It is not a new phenomenon; it is something that I raised on the Floor of the House five years ago because I could see it becoming the next big scandal, and sadly that has come to pass. Homeowners who buy their homes in good faith understandably expect to live in a functioning estate where responsibilities are clear and, where necessary, charges are fair. All too often, the opposite is the case. Homeowners are left in the pernicious situation of paying for services once in their council tax bill, and once again in extortionate service charges. Poor services are often exacerbated by a lack of accountability. Residents are forced to persistently chase matters, while frequently being passed from one organisation to another without resolution. But as soon as residents fall behind with a payment, these companies leap into action, often using aggressive debt collection tactics. Adding insult to injury, the financial structures of these estates are all too frequently opaque: governance structures lack transparency; companies are labelled as dormant for accounting purposes; and dodgy practice—where freeholders, management companies and debt recovery companies operate in an interconnected web—allows them to rack up eye-watering fees. I will cite one very recent example from my constituency, where a constituent owed some service charges to RMG, with which I think we all are familiar. Looking at his bill, the constituent had been charged an instruction fee and a client admin fee on top of his service charges, adding another £600 to the bill, yet RMG had somehow managed to inflate the £1,100 owed in service charges to £3,300 by the time court papers were issued. There is no world where a trebling of this sum can be justified, and it just shows what a scam the system is. Time and again, I see people raising problems from a range of new build developments in my constituency, including Ledsham Garden Village, Mersey View and Jacks Wood estates, where homeowners face a range of challenges. In Ledsham Garden Village, residents are facing combined service charges and fees running into hundreds of thousands of pounds, although only a fraction of the spending can be accounted for, which just rubs salt into the wound. Residents do not have any idea how the money is being spent and if it is being spent on the estate at all; they do not know whether the company is getting best value for money, how reserves are being used or how costs are allocated over different phases of the development. There are persistent maintenance issues, inconsistent grounds maintenance and safety concerns because of poor traffic management. People who buy their homes in good faith deserve better. Then there are the Jacks Wood estate in Ellesmere Port and the Mersey View estate in Bromborough, where the adoption process has effectively stalled, leaving residents in limbo. The regulation of managing agencies is clearly something this House would like to see, but I would like to make some further suggestions. We could introduce standard costs across the country for estate management fees so that there would be a baseline from which to judge these companies. Residents could be given a far greater say over who manages their estate. We could have three-yearly ballots in law on whether they wish to carry on with the same management agents, which could end the “put up or shut up” approach that a lot of these companies adopt. As we have heard suggested today, an immediate step the Government could take would be to make it a condition of any planning permission moving forward that the developers must hand over the whole estate adoption to the local authority and pay a commuted sum for it, ending that revenue stream entirely.

• 2 Jul 2026 · Commonhold and Leasehold Reform: Managing Agents · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend, the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, for recognising the work done not only by me, but by Peter Bottomley and Jim Fitzpatrick on the APPG. I was struck by a comment in the Committee’s report about the argument put forward by some freeholders that ground rents are used to cover service charges and that people will be put in danger if they are lost. The Committee used the word “shameful” for that argument. Does that not show that this system is a money-making racket? People are using any excuse to carry on that income stream.

• 2 Jul 2026 · Commonhold and Leasehold Reform: Managing Agents · Hansard source

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  Yes, indeed. Residents of an estate in Eastham have been paying for a sewer that they cannot actually locate, which just shows that there is too much ambiguity over what these charges are for. Finally, local authorities could be given powers to use their resources to bring estates up to an adoptable level and then charge the developers for that work retrospectively. The developers do not want to do it, and we need to find a way of breaking that logjam. These are just some of the measures that, alongside the many welcome reforms from this Government, would improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

• 15 Jun 2026 · Leasehold Reform · Hansard source

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  15. What steps his Department is taking to reform the leasehold sector.

• 15 Jun 2026 · Leasehold Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for coming to speak to the all-party parliamentary group on leasehold and commonhold reform and setting out so comprehensively his vision for ending fleecehold for good. He has explained many of the things that need to be done to get us to that place, including fixing some of the flaws in the 2024 Act, which will enable enfranchisement to proceed. There is a great deal of interest in this issue, so can he set out when we will see the long-awaited consultation on valuation rates for enfranchisement?

• 18 May 2026 · Backing Business to Create Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  In the face of the local election results last week, it is undeniable that what we have done so far is not enough. The long tail of austerity means that we have so much more to do. People see a world moving at a rate of knots and are frustrated at this Government’s slow pace of change. We live in a world where we can order almost anything we want in the morning and have it delivered later that same day. For consumers, satisfaction is now almost instantaneous. That is in complete contrast to Government, where improvements are seen as slow. The expectations and the challenge that we face are there for all to see. What does the King’s Speech do to address what I consider to be the holy trinity of what good Labour Governments do: jobs, homes and health? First, there are two pieces of legislation on homes. The social housing renewal Bill will alter the right to buy by increasing the eligibility requirement by 10 years, amending percentage discounts to better align with new maximum discounts and exempting newly built social housing from the right to buy for 35 years. This area is like so many other Thatcher legacies. The sugar rush felt in the short term by those able to buy their home at a substantial discount has long been replaced by a broken social housing market in which people living in identical properties next to each other can pay massively differently rents. It is a market in which the taxpayer often subsidises inflated rents through housing benefit and millions of young people who might once have seen a council home as their natural route into adulthood have the option forever denied to them. We can see where the logic of right to buy takes us. Between April 2012 and March 2025, 133,000 social homes were sold, but only 51,000 were replaced. With 1.3 million people on council house waiting lists, the problem is obvious for all to see. Secondly on housing, the long-awaited draft commonhold and leasehold reform Bill will bring us closer to ending the feudal leasehold system. It will finally ban the use of leasehold for new build flats, it will place a cap on ground rents, and it will create a new legal framework for commonhold. There is huge demand for this to be done as soon as possible, and I know the Minister is going as fast as he safely can, but he also needs to tackle rip-off estate management fees—he has to stop that model in its tracks. If we are determined to tackle the cost of living crisis, that is one obvious and indefensible practice that we can end. Alongside addressing the problems that people face now, the Government must take steps to address the problems that are coming down the track. I believe that the unwritten social contract that if a person works hard and plays by the rules, they can expect a good standard of living in return, is disintegrating and under real threat. Across this country, economic growth no longer translates to better outcomes in life, something that is only set to continue with the increase in AI in the workplace and developments in automation. Graduate roles have already been hit—graduate vacancies have fallen by more than one third this year—and that trend will only continue and diffuse across other areas of the labour market. Young people are therefore growing up and entering a world of work that is detached from previous norms, and we are nowhere near ready for the resulting changes that we will see in the next decade. The state needs to be ready to respond to those shifts, to ensure that not only those entering the workforce, but those who are already in it and those who are displaced, are properly skilled for the needs of the future labour market. That future labour market has to include significantly more manufacturing roles, as the Secretary of State acknowledged in his speech. The more we can make ourselves, the more insulated we will be from the inevitable disruption that AI is going to cause to jobs, particularly in the service sector, but it will also better protect us from the global supply chain shocks that we are far too exposed to at the moment. The moves to protect UK steel are the right first step in recognising that we need to do much more to protect our manufacturing base. I am not proposing that we nationalise everything—I will leave that for other people to do—but my visit to the local Vauxhall car plant last week was a clear lesson in how we need to sharpen up across the whole of Government to protect manufacturing, and the UK automotive sector in particular. The decision on employee car ownership schemes in the last Budget was welcome, as is support for energy costs next year, but of course, the industry would like that support to be much sooner and much stronger than what is proposed. There are a number of factors challenging the automotive sector, but the biggest one and the one over which the Government have the most control is the ZEV mandate. There has been huge investment in the Ellesmere Port plant so that it can manufacture electric vehicles, and I believe that most of the UK automotive sector is supportive of an electric future. However, the reality is that the current level of sales is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to hit the ZEV mandate, and that gap is only going to get bigger each year. We need to be clear that this is not just a case of “Oh, well, we aren’t going to hit the target.” Every sale short of that target has direct financial consequences for UK manufacturers. Looking around the world, we see that most countries that have put in place sales targets for electric vehicles have had to row back from them in light of the evidence that uptake just is not where it was predicted to be. We need to bring the review forward and make the decision now that the escalation of targets under the ZEV mandate needs to be turned off. This is not something to be looked at in the abstract, on a graph in the corridors of Whitehall; it needs to be looked at in the context of the cold reality of consumer choice and the importance of protecting UK manufacturing. Let us not lose good manufacturing jobs in pursuit of the unattainable—all that will do is supercharge the Chinese automotive sector. That is not going to help the planet as much as we would like, and it certainly is not going to help this country. We have a great tradition of building vehicles in this country, and we want to be at the vanguard of taking the industry into the future, but let us do it in a sustainable way that protects and builds on what we have. We need to do more to support UK manufacturing through procurement. I was delighted recently to take a Royal Mail delivery van made in Ellesmere Port for a spin, with permission from the owner. That electric van, made down the road, is delivering mail to my constituents. We need to see much more of that, and we need to encourage UK companies to buy from the UK. Every part of the public sector should be required to buy British. Every council, every hospital and every school should seek to maximise that, because every taxpayer pound spent on UK goods goes back into our economy. We can do a lot without legislation, but we need to pursue it with great zeal. This is all about levelling the playing field, because more needs to be done. When people see barber shops and vape shops proliferate on their high streets, they know that something is not right, as there simply is not the market to sustain them all. When they see some shut down, perhaps for selling illicit goods or for illegal working, it confirms their suspicions that they are not competing with legitimate businesses. When we see them reopen a few months later, perhaps under a different name, people see a system struggling to cope with the scale of organised crime infecting our high streets. The time for which a shop can be closed for breaching the law will be doubled, but let us also go after the landlords for, at best, failing to do due diligence, and at worst for being complicit in illegal activity. We can do more to support our small businesses on the high street and get the level playing field that we desperately need. We also need a level playing field in how we treat people at work. We have to accept that bogus self-employment is a business model based on denying workers basic protections at work, and it is absolutely the wrong direction for this country. We promised in our manifesto that we would tackle this, so we should get on with it. On a related note, the proposed strengthening of the growth duty, which will apparently reduce unnecessary risk aversion, is misguided. Good businesses want their staff to work in safe environments, and they want them to be treated well. This so-called unnecessary risk aversion, referred to in documents that the Government have produced, is an illusion—a straw man—and it has been used to put up with other shortcomings. We face many challenges. I think we are on the right track, but we need to go much further and much faster. The public are telling us that they need to see results. We are now two years into this Government, and as much as the news cycle is hyper-focused on personality, the King’s Speech is all about policy. It is about how we shape a better future and show voters that they were right to put their trust in the Labour party to deliver for them. Everyone here knows the perils that lie ahead if we are not bold enough, if we are not determined enough and if we do not use the time that we have to deliver real change. We are nearing the halfway point of this Parliament and, while progress has been made, it is abundantly clear that we need to go much further if we are to show that we have the power to transform the lives of ordinary people in this country. The clock is ticking. Incrementalism will not cut it. We now need a response that rises to the urgent challenges that our country faces, so let us go out there and do it.

• 13 Apr 2026 · Draft Building Safety (Responsible Actors Scheme and Prohibitions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Edward, and to see my hon. Friend the Minister in her place. I want to understand a bit more about the operation of the prohibitions list. I note from the Department’s webpage that there are no suppliers or providers on that list. Is that because no one has fallen foul of the regulations, or because they were so inadequately drafted in the first place that it was not possible to put people on the list?

• 13 Apr 2026 · Draft Building Safety (Responsible Actors Scheme and Prohibitions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Gentleman will appreciate that the Housing Minister would have to recuse himself of any involvement in a matter involving his own constituency.

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I am sorry; I am not going to take any more interventions. I think the pay-per-mile system is the right thing to do, although I do have concerns about the timing and how it will work in practice. I have to say, I did enjoy putting the question to Conservative Treasury Ministers when they were in government and never getting any answer at all, so I am pleased that this Government are at least acknowledging that this is an issue that needs tackling. The hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) is right to raise concerns about what the change will mean for the sector. The OBR has forecast that there could be around 120,000 fewer electric car sales over the forecast period, which of course will not be welcome news, and certainly is not helpful for our emissions targets. It is worth pointing out that the automotive sector is already at a precariously low level of production, and of course not all sales of EVs will be for UK-manufactured vehicles. In my opinion, we really ought to be giving generous discounts—the majority of those cars are built here, so we absolutely need to see more done to boost demand. Measures such as the electric car grant, which was launched earlier this year, continue to support people who want to switch to EVs, particularly with vehicles actually made in this country—that is a very important part of the scheme. However, even with that generous incentive, the pay-per-mile proposals will see us lose ground. The Budget also contained measures on boosting charging infrastructure, which is really important, as it will give people confidence to make a purchase, but we cannot pretend that everything in this Budget goes all the way. That is, of course, before we get into the practicalities, so we need further thoughts on implementation. This is a progressive Budget. It is a Budget that protects the most vulnerable, puts money into workers’ pockets and begins to rebalance the tax system and to make it fairer. There is no doubt that there is much more to be done in the longer term: we need to see faster improvements in our crumbling public services; food inflation remains stubborn, and is predicted to continue to be high over the medium term; housing costs mean that for many, renting—let alone buying—is still out of reach; and social care costs still mean that many people lose their home at the end of their lives, so we need that review of social care to deliver. Those are longer-term challenges, but for today, I believe the Chancellor has played a difficult hand pretty well.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Property Service Charges · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) on her excellent speech and on securing the debate. I state for the record that I am a patron of the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, which does such good work in advising leaseholders. It was eight years ago that I stood on the Opposition side of the Chamber and described the use of leasehold in new developments as the payment protection insurance of the house building industry. I am pleased to say that the previous Government eventually started to tackle that, and the current Government will hopefully complete that work soon so that we can finally condemn leasehold to the history books. It was four years ago that I stood on the Opposition side of the Chamber and warned that estate management fees could replacement leasehold as the new PPI of the house building industry—or, as the indomitable women of the National Leasehold Campaign termed it, “fleecehold.” Now that has come to pass; it seems that just about every new development built in this country adopts the same exploitative model, and the public are rightly asking what we are going to do about it. The Minister has amassed great expertise in this area, and I know he is keen to crack on with reform. There are a number of legal cases ongoing. I am pleased to see that the bogus argument about human rights has been dispatched by the High Court. However, there are a number of others where well-resourced freeholders are trying to preserve the status quo, and not every court is as wise as the High Court was in the human rights case. The Court of Appeal recently found in the Romney House case that where a tenant goes to the first-tier tribunal to challenge a service charge, the tribunal needs only to consider whether the process was reasonable, and not whether the charges themselves were reasonable. That is absurd, and has had the effect of requiring those leaseholders to pay for the refurbishment of a gym that they do not actually own. It is freeholders with their seemingly limitless resources that can challenge and delay actions by leaseholders to preserve their rotten system at every turn, so the sooner we implement the leasehold Act in full the better. There is a clear warning here as to why we must crack on with tackling estate management fees more broadly. I look forward to the Government’s response to the consultation. When it comes to stopping any more estates being built in this way, and we must end this practice as a matter of urgency, I suggest, as the hon. Member did, that it will actually be much easier to do this than it has been for ending leasehold. I urge the Minister to send a clear instruction to local authorities that estate management arrangements will no longer be accepted in planning applications, and to legislate to ban them on any new developments if necessary. The longer we put off fixing that, the longer it will take to fix this mess. I fear the Minister will be told that such a move would have an impact on the ambitious house building plans that we rightly have and would damage the housing market more generally, but were we not faced with the same arguments when we tried to abolish leasehold? After all, these developers do not have to pay a community sum to the local authority—indeed, they have an additional lucrative income stream—but despite those new income sources, it does not seem to have had any impact on the price they charge for people to buy their homes in the first place. The reality is that an estate management company is nothing more than a calculation on a balance sheet. The developers have zero interest in keeping the verges neat and tidy after they have gone. If they can make the bottom line look more attractive by creating the management company, they will, and they keep getting away with it because we let them. Of course, we must act to protect those already caught in this trap. It is also clear, as we have heard, that many people are not aware of the implications of an estate management company or how much it will cost them when they buy their home. Often, first-time buyers are excited by the prospect of owning a new home, and they place their trust in the system—the lenders, the developers, the lawyers—and the echoes of the leasehold scandal with this are loud. Glitzy sales staff paint a very different picture. They never set out the reality that, in addition to the significant commitment people are making when they buy a home, they are also agreeing to pay an unspecified sum to often unspecified recipients for as long as they stay in that home. The mis-selling and failure to properly advise has all the hallmarks of the leasehold scandal. We should not be surprised by that because the same actors are involved in that industry as are involved in these rip-offs. An example of some of the novel ways that this financial trap can be described by sales staff came to my attention when constituents on a recently built estate all had the common explanation given to them that this service charge was for a storm drain, but that it would be paid off in a few years so they did not need to worry about it. Well, they are still paying it 15 years later. They are not even sure if there is a storm drain and, even if there is, who is actually responsible for it, and yet the invoices and threatening letters still come. We also recently met interested parties on another new development where we were trying to clarify who was responsible for maintaining what and who they were accountable to. Because the estate had been developed over several years by different developers, about 10 different organisations were represented at that meeting. It is little wonder that we struggle for transparency with so many people involved. The fundamental question from the homeowner is: why are we paying twice for the maintenance of open spaces, once through a management fee and once through council tax? We should start from the basic principle that the local council should be doing all the work and that estate management companies are an unnecessary tax on homeowners. How long will it be before we see a concerted campaign for people to get reductions on their council tax on the basis that they are being taxed twice? In the wrong hands, that sort of campaign could pit communities against one another. Let us not forget that buying a home is the biggest single purchase people will ever make. We need far greater accountability for what developers say and what they build. Housing is of course a critical part of our infrastructure and a fundamental part of a person’s life, but it has been shown time and again that we cannot rely on the market alone to deliver that in a responsible way. Let us get control over these companies, empower homeowners and legislate if necessary so that this rotten, avaricious model becomes history, just like leasehold eventually will.