Park Homes

Justin Tomlinson Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Hon. Members will be interested to know that there is a blog on which one can follow some interesting debates concerning the residents of park homes. Let me quote from one which asks,

“are the government going to sit up and take notice of us the residents, or are we to remain”

the forgotten lost? That is the challenge for us today, and the forgotten lost are not few in number. As the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) pointed out, there are 80,000 such homes in England, and I would guesstimate that these contain slightly under 150,000 people. That is a large army—indeed, several times the army that Wat Tyler took to London bridge in the peasants’ revolt of 1381. There is a sense in which the residents of park homes today are the equivalent of modern serfs, under arbitrary landlords; or, as the Housing Minister put it more gently, there is an issue about exercising their rights.

I would like to join the many other hon. Members who have paid tribute to the hon. Lady for securing this debate today, in which many people on this side of the House, and one hon. Gentleman on the other side, have spoken for this large community of some 150,000 people. My hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) commented that the hon. Lady had been buried under a sea of bouquets. I hope that she has all her bouquets, but that she is not buried, because we need her very much above the ground and kicking in order to take the motion forward. I should also like to pay tribute to Lord Graham of Edmonton. He is no relation, and I think that he holds different political views from mine, but I know that he has done some very good work on this subject.

We welcome the Government’s commitment to the transfer of responsibility from the county courts to the residential property tribunals in February, although we recognise that that will not in itself solve everything. I would like to develop a few themes on certain issues and potential solutions that the Minister might like to consider. The first is the recognition of legal residents associations, to which one or two other Members have alluded. There are two park home sites in my constituency, one of which is Woodlands Park in Quedgeley. It has a residents association, which has been admirably chaired by Mike Morgan for many years, but the association is not fully recognised by the owner of Woodlands Park. It is high time that it was, and the same is true for all park homes.

In the motion, the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole rightly calls on the Government

“to review the case for establishing a fit and proper person criterion for park home site owners”.

I believe that the best way to take this forward would be for the Government to approve the licensing of park home sites by local authorities. This would have the additional advantage of the licensing authority being able to overview the documentation—sales documents, in particular—to ensure that any buyers of park homes were fully aware of the system of remuneration for owners, which is based on the sale price, the commission and the pitch rent. Those details need to be clarified and spelt out extremely clearly, so that anyone who buys a park home can be aware of what they are doing.

The motion also proposes that owners should cease to interfere with the sale process. I agree with that, but we also need to consider how the loopholes in section 207 of the Housing Act 2004 could be tightened up. In relation to the sale commission, in particular, there is a case for licensing authorities to look at whether a sliding scale could be established, which would vary according to the length of residency by the people who buy park homes.

I should like to highlight some further points that have arisen in relation to Woodlands Park and that could also be reviewed by licensing authorities. The first relates to utilities, and I should like to quote from a recent e-mail on this subject:

“Any resident changing to natural gas from bottled gas has to pay £6.50 a week extra for the privilege. Note this figure is added to the monthly pitch fee and continues for life!”

That cannot be justifiable, and charges for utilities should be brought under the licensing authorities’ review.

The second issue relates to pitch fees, and I quote again:

“One of our residents who moved to the site was paying £106.72 per month pitch fees. This was confirmed in writing…in March 2007…and a letter followed in December 2007 stating that he had underpaid therefore the pitch fee was increased to £140.38 per month. This equates to a 31.5% increase.”

That was entirely arbitrary; it was done after the sale, and there is no way for the resident to challenge it except through the very expensive process of going to the county court. That, too, needs to be reviewed.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

On the point about seeking legal recourse, my own experience of dealing with the challenges faced by the residents of Blunsdon Abbey Park is that they often have neither the financial nor the health capability to engage in a long legal battle.

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. The financial costs of such proceedings are prohibitive, even when residents are physically and mentally able to take the process forward.

In the review of the process sales cost, sales commission and pitch fee in its 2001 study, Berkeley Hanover said that there was no evidence of excessive profits as a whole, but that the process could not be described as

“perfectly fair, flexible and transparent”.

I think that that is putting it mildly, and that the issue needs to be tackled.

Today there has been a call for action—for what the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole called a stiffening of resolve. I think that all of us who have spoken so far today feel the same. I ask the Minister and the Government to consider making local government licensing authorities responsible for approving, monitoring and licensing park homes, for clarifying the sales process and in particular the commission, for ensuring that the correct documents are issued before the sale of homes, for reviewing the charges for utilities, and for the collection of rubbish and environmental health—a subsidiary issue which, although sometimes overlooked, needs attention in many park homes at a time when we are all keen to drive up recycling rates.

Today the Government have a chance to help 150,000 British citizens without having any impact on the ghastly budget deficit. I hope that they will seize the moment, and will give our constituents a very happy new year in 2011.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Buckland]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who allows me seamlessly to move on to my final point, bearing in mind the need for other colleagues to have their say.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) made some cogent points about the provisions of section 207 of the Housing Act 2004, which amended the schedule that applies to the procedure to be adopted on the sale of park homes. That schedule has been subject to several amendments and it is sometimes difficult to follow the path that allows one to work out precisely what is in force and what is not. I understand that from the moment a request is made by the occupier—the owner of the park home—the owner of the site has to respond within 28 days to

“approve the person, unless it is reasonable for him not to do so, and…serve on the occupier notice of his decision whether or not to approve the person.”

I am afraid that is far too honoured in the breach, than in the observance. When it is honoured it is being used as a mechanism to delay sale for reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) has set out very carefully.

[Justin Tomlinson]

I also see examples in which site owners are trying to get long-term residents out of the site and new tenants in on temporary contracts so that they can ultimately try to put the site up for sale for potential residential development at huge profit.

[Mr Buckland]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, which has not been made before. We know that unscrupulous site owners will drive down the value of a park home, buy it at that low value and, sometimes, re-sell the same home to make a fast profit. That is an unacceptable abuse of the current situation.

A concrete proposal that the Minister could consider is whether we should adopt a system of deemed acceptance by an owner after a certain period. My experience locally and more generally is that there is often a disastrous combination of indifference and incompetence mixed with cynicism and a wish to make an illicit profit, but why should we allow sites where there is that cocktail to benefit from the current regulations? We should punish incompetence and indifference by adopting principles such as deemed acceptance. Currently, the onus is on the park home owner to seek from the court—I welcome the fact that it will soon be a tribunal—a declaration that the person to whom they wish to sell their property has been approved. Many hon. Members have asked whether that is the right balance. Are we asking too much of people, many of whom are vulnerable, or of the dependants of people who have died and left their park home as part of their bequest? Should we not redress the balance and put the ball back in the court of the park home owner when it comes to sales? I urge the Minister seriously to consider the principle of deemed acceptance and whether it can be worked into a revised schedule. That would be a better way of dealing with the legislation than tweaking it as we have in the past few years.