Matt Western, MP for Warwick and Leamington, has taken on what he is calling the "scam and scandal of estate charges on unadopted estates".

In questions in Parliament on Thursday 20 March, the local MP raised that hundreds of thousands of households live on unadopted estates and that rather than just paying council tax, they also pay a monthly fee to developers as their roads have not yet been adopted by the council. 

Councils are only able to adopt roads through an agreement with the developer.

According to the Labour MP, some developers are choosing to hand the roads over to a management company rather than handing them over to the council to manage. 

A management company is then able to charge residents what the local MP is calling an 'estate charge' for 'management of the estate'. Residents are then paying both council tax and this 'estate charge'.  

Mr Western says he has been told some of these 'estate charges' mean residents are paying an extra £200 on top of council tax bills with residents reporting their roads looking worse than the ones managed by the council, on which residents are paying far less. 

The local MP says there are a number of estates in his Warwick and Leamington constituency that have reported such problems to him. He says from conversations with MPs from across the country, it is "clear the problem is widespread" and "a new way for developers to rip off residents". 

"Residents are faced with the ludicrous situation where they pay an extra charge to use the same roads as their neighbours who don't pay the charge, purely based on who built their house and whether they decided to offer the road up for adoption to the county council," he said.

"It appears that residents have access to the exact same facilities, roads, playgrounds and waste services, but some are paying an additional cost for these which goes directly into the pockets of the management companies.

"I will continue to raise this issue with the government and developers and express the severity of this situation. It is unacceptable that such 'estate charges' seem to have been created simply as a way to extract more money from residents."