I am grateful to my hon. Friend. If he will sign me up as a member, I would be happy to join the group. I will ask Arun to send the information to him.
I had not realised how much work I had been drawn into on this topic. I looked at the files this morning and they are enormous, most of the material generated by people more expert than I am. I came into it because some elderly, frail, poor leaseholders were being abused. Because that intervention worked, I was more drawn in. I would prefer to have spoken in the later debate about other cases of injustice that affect individuals, but the leasehold/commonhold area is so big and, as we explained to the Backbench Business Committee last week when it kindly heard the application by the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse, there are issues of structure of government.
The motion suggests that leasehold and commonhold issues have been considered. They have not been properly considered as a whole since 1991 and they need a great deal more attention. I have been involved in a number of campaigns in my parliamentary life. Not one has brought in so many cases from other people’s constituencies, so this debate will help to raise awareness among other Members of Parliament. I thank the House for listening to me at greater length than I would normally speak.
Given that there are 5 million to 6 million leaseholders in the country, far more than public estimates, the Office for National Statistics should be able to work out the trends and numbers as national statistics and clarify the situation so that we can see what good is being done and what more good needs to be done, and so that we can also find a way of making the property tribunals work at the lowest possible cost with the smallest number of cases.
I strongly recommend to my hon. Friend the Minister discussing whether he can get graphs which show what the cost of extending or purchasing freeholds should be, which will eliminate a lot of the work for the good professionals and abolish all the opportunities for the bad professionals, the bad freeholders and the crooked managing agents to go on treading over poor people who ought to have the chance to live in their homes at peace.
2.12 pm