I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

I am very happy to move the new clause, which would amend the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 to adopt recommendation 5 of the Law Commission’s right to manage report. That would allow leaseholders in mixed-use buildings with shared services or an underground car park to exercise the right to manage.

We had some debate on this issue last week. I recall, from the time of the 2002 Act, that flatted developments—especially mixed-use blocks—had not taken off yet in England in the same way as they have over the past 22 years. Given the proliferation of mixed-use buildings, the paradigms of the 2002 Act are therefore now outdated and unfair. Developers have sought to use the Act to secure the exclusion of leaseholders on the basis of shared services. If the Government do not move on the issue of shared services, many of the leaseholders in mixed-used buildings who would otherwise have benefited from the uplift in the non-residential limit from 25% to 50%—which, as I said last week, I welcome—will still not qualify for the right to manage or for enfranchisement.

We heard from the founders of the National Leasehold Campaign and from Free Leaseholders on this point. It was clear from the evidence that the presence of a plant room or underground car park alone can disqualify leaseholders from appointing their own managing agent and controlling the service charges, which they already have to pay but do not have any influence over.

The Law Commission did a great deal of work on the right to manage. It stated:

“We recommend that premises should be eligible for the RTM if they are a building or part which is reasonably capable of being managed independently. This means that if leaseholders cannot demonstrate that their premises are either a self-contained building or self-contained part of a building, the RTM will still be available if the premises are nevertheless a building or part which is reasonably capable of being managed independently. This might be straightforwardly demonstrated where parts of a building are already subject to separate management arrangements.”

That is the Law Commission’s case, and it looked into this with great care. It said:

“We think this will lead to fewer Tribunal cases and where there are still disputes the focus will instead switch to whether the premises can properly be managed autonomously, rather than their physical attributes.”

So I plead the backing of the Law Commission; I plead the common sense of some of the foremost jurors of our age. I am sure that the Minister will take on board their wisdom, if not mine.