My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and there is a very strong basis for a wider mis-selling scandal inquiry. Many properties are affected: in terms of houses, for which the practice has been particularly egregious, more than 500,000 leasehold houses have been built over the past 10 years. The vast majority of them are in the north-west of England and north Wales, which is why so many colleagues from those areas are here this evening.
The rights to collect the ground rents are bought and sold on the financial markets as steady income streams to investors, while leaseholders get nothing back for—in some cases—thousands of pounds a year. There is hardly a clearer illustration of the damaging pervasive tendency to treat housing as an investment opportunity—as a product to trade on the market—rather than as homes where people live and build their lives around. That should be the basis of housing in this country. We have lost somewhere what housing is: homes, places where we live, where lives are built, where we become successful —or not—and where we bring up a family. Housing is not a commodity to be traded on the financial market. We have seen more starkly than ever over the past two years that housing is also a public health issue, an educational issue, and a work, security and happiness issue, and we should begin to treat it as such.
Although we welcome this Bill, it is a very narrow first step; there are many glaring omissions—measures which could have been included even in such a narrow Bill. First, there is nothing to prevent freeholders from simply transferring their income stream from ground rents to service charges or administration or other charges, as has been highlighted. As shown by the ground rent scandal itself, there is no limit to the ingenuity that some freeholders will draw on to capitalise off the back of leaseholders. Service charges and administration charges are opaque at best, and far too hard to challenge. Will the Minister address that issue later on?