Where are the Tories on New Build

Estate Adoption v Service Charges?

With the news that large new build housing developers are forcing buyers of new homes on their estates to use Broadband supplied by them and have stopped competitors from even thinking about supplying services to new housing estates as they aren’t being allowed to cross the land of the new build housing developer Barons to supply the necessary infrastructure to give you choice over who supplies e-services to your very expensive new home.

This is just one of the ways in which housing developers are becoming the new controllers of large swathes of society and they are getting away with their huge money making schemes.

Large developers see your new home as a long term income stream and not just as in the past, a saleable item. The growth of service charges to tidy the estate you live on and cut the grass and pick the litter that you may have thought prior to purchase that the Council would manage on your behalf out of the Council tax you also still have to pay is information that seems to be missed when you appear at an estates sales office. Solicitors, in the conversations reported to us here at Murky by residents of estates such as South Shore in Blyth, Northumberland, as an example don’t appear to impress on their clients strongly enough, that service charges, whether you're a freeholder or a leaseholder will negate the responsibilities of your Council and bleed you dry into the process.

Service Charges are a relatively new phenomenon that has grown rapidly since 2010 although some did exist to clean stairwells and small estate grounds maintenance and management of blocks of flats prior to that date the growth of this long term after sales income stream has increased rapidly throughout the last 11 years of Tory Governments.

These new barons have their income, a good proportion of your income, nailed in for life and as they also supply about 10% of the cash the Tory Party needs, almost  £1,000,000 each and every year in donations we can see why the current Government is forced to support the money spinning activities of the developers.

The background noise on these matters has grown into a crescendo over the last decade plus, and in order to placate backbench Tory MP’s and Councils who are under pressure from residents the Government in the shape of the PM announced that all leaseholders can buy the freehold of the property they live in. Nice you may think, but it's a complete blind when it comes to service charge extinction as Robert Jenricks new changes to planning law do not support adoption of estates by your Council they instead talk of freeholders having to create estate committees to manage estates. Those committees would still have to make service charges to undertake the work and probably admin charges to cover their running costs. 

Also no one from Robert Jenricks department has explained what would happen if some residents couldn't afford to buy the freehold and how mixed tenure would pan out if adoption by your Council is to become a reduced option. We suspect that the cost of running estates would spiral out of control as developers will want long term security for their shareholders at your expense unless the law is changed to help.

Both Labour and the LibDems have grasped the nettle. They are campaigning on the issues and state they are both prepared to change the law on equality and equity grounds so that all homeowners can become part of their local Councils corporate plans and not subject to exhorbitant service charge arrangements.

It would be nice to hear from Northumberland Conservatives on one of their social media platforms to see how the new Leader of Council, Glenn Sanderson, a true blue farming Councillor will handle the matter or does he even understand the argument from an overpaying residents point of view?