2. Will the First Minister provide an update on the Welsh Government's response to the report of the task and finish group for leasehold reform? OAQ54611

I thank the Member for that question. The Minister for Housing and Local Government is currently giving careful consideration to the recommendations of the task and finish group. We do not now expect to receive reports from the Law Commission until the spring, but the Minister will provide an update during this autumn term, as previously indicated.

I'd like to emphasise the importance of this report for my constituents. Freehold residents in Cwm Calon in Ystrad Mynach are currently paying upwards of £150 a year for maintenance work on their estate, carried out by an estate management company. There is currently no cap on how high those charges can go, and residents cannot sell their properties until they've paid those charges, and, if they don't pay them, they're subject to county court judgments. And they're on top of their council tax. The fact that any maintenance work is going on at this estate at all is a testament to the work of the voluntary, estate-based Cwm Calon liaison group, which was set up by residents to liaise with the estate management company to get them to do the work. There is no power to make them do the work, but they managed to work with that company to make them do it. I'm currently trying to get a meeting between Redrow, the estate management company, and the council together, and currently I'm having a nightmare getting Redrow to respond to me. We're desperate to get this meeting together. We need regulation to enforce the work that is going on here, and we need regulations to enforce the power of residents in these circumstances. In particular, Welsh Government must support local authorities in adopting green spaces, so that they don't have to pay these charges, and, from a trading standards perspective, residents feel that they have been missold their properties. Can the First Minister, therefore, take these comments on board? This is residents speaking to me out of desperation. Can the First Minister take these comments on board, and please can we proceed to regulation as quickly as possible?

Llywydd, I thank the Member for those very important points. He is drawing attention to the fact that, although the task and finish group was set up to deal with leasehold reform, there was a particular workstream within it dealing with freehold matters as well. And this is a very complex area of law and policy, Llywydd, which is why, as well as the taskforce that has reported to my colleague Julie James, the Minister for Economy and Transport also set up a taskforce to look at issues surrounding unadopted roads. Because unadopted roads is a very important subset of estate management charges of the sort referred to by Hefin David.

In a very complex picture, with many different actions, I'm going to just highlight three things this afternoon, if I could. First of all, as a result of that report, we have set up the Wales conveyancer accreditation scheme, because the report said that one of the really important things was to make sure that, at the point of purchase, people got proper advice. Otherwise, people find themselves in the position that Hefin outlined, where they find charges imposed on them that they hadn't anticipated, find it very difficult to get an explanation of where those charges derive from or to get any sense of how those charges are to be regulated in the future. If you're buying a house under Help to Buy now in Wales you've got to use a conveyancer who's been accredited. The accreditation is a high bar, where people have to be able to demonstrate that they've been trained and are properly equipped to ensure that customers are adequately informed at the point of purchase.

The second thing we are looking at is strengthened rights. Leaseholders have rights and legal protections. For example, they can challenge the reasonableness of service charges under the provisions in the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985. Freeholders do not have those protections, which is how they end up in the position of the residents in Hefin David's constituency. The Law Commission report, which I referred to in my answer, is now expected in 2020, and we do not hold back at all from the possibility that we will want to legislate, but we will need to legislate in the light of the wider recommendations that that report will make.

And, finally and thirdly, to take up the point of unadopted roads and the charges that people find themselves having to pay there, as a result of the taskforce that Ken Skates has established, all parties are now agreed on common national standards. A good practice guide has been produced and has been disseminated to all local authorities, and a database is being developed of historic unadopted roads across Wales, so we have a better sense of the challenge that is there. All of those were recommendations of the taskforce. All three of them have been implemented and all of them I think will be of relevance to Hefin David's constitutents. 

First Minister, do you join with me in welcoming Persimmon Homes' decision to settle out of court during the summer and grant 55 householders on a Cardiff estate—St Edeyrns—their leasehold free of charge? They were on that estate despite the fact that the other 1,100 properties were sold as freehold, and it really is time that developers stopped using leasehold simply as another tool to generate income. It should only be used when the type of tenure requires leasehold, and there are times when it does, but usually on these residential estates freehold is what should be granted. 

Well, I entirely agree with the Member there, and he will be pleased, I know, to see that the figures released by the Office for National Statistics show that, in Wales, the proportion of new house sales that were leasehold decreased from 18 per cent in 2017 to 2.6 per cent in 2018,FootnoteLink and we anticipate a further reduction when the figures for 2019 are published. And that is because of an agreement with the volume house builders that no Help to Buy or Wales property development fund houses will be built in future as leasehold homes, and that's a very important advance that we've been able to make in Wales. 

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