Park Home Owners

Peter Swallow Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Mr Joshua Reynolds]

My hon. Friend is completely right. Park home residents have had consultation after consultation over many years. Site owners will respond to the current Government consultation, because they have lawyers to back them up and support them in putting in their thoughts, but the park home owners I have spoken to worry that there is no point in submitting responses to yet another consultation when, as they see it, nothing is going to happen. I worry that far fewer park home owners will respond to this consultation, and we will therefore end up with a one-sided consultation.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

I thank my constituency neighbour for giving way. As he knows, there are many park homes across Bracknell Forest, which we both represent. I understand the scepticism that some have expressed about the call for evidence, but as he has identified, the Government need to put forward something that can stand up to those with very expensive lawyers behind them. Will he therefore take this opportunity to urge everyone who lives in a park home, whether in Bracknell Forest or elsewhere across the country, to contribute to that call for evidence, so that the evidence base can be as robust as it needs to be and we can abolish the 10% charge?

[Mr Reynolds]

I thank my constituency neighbour for that point. It is incredibly important that everybody responds to the consultation, so we must encourage more people to do so.

The financial cost of the 10% commission is only part of the story. We have heard time and again about unscrupulous site owners who have used intimidation to drive residents off their pitches. There are fewer bad actors who own sites than there were a number of years ago, but some still know that if they intimidate residents and force a sale, they will get a 10% commission. We see that time and again. In my constituency, one owner bought a site for £200,000. They then intimidated countless park home residents, who sold their properties, and made that £200,000 back within less than 12 months. That is the business model of unscrupulous site owners. We need to think about where the 10% commission came from. It has not always been 10%: it was 15% a number of years ago, so it is an arbitrary number.

I pay tribute to Sonia McColl OBE and the Park Home Owners Justice Campaign. Over decades, she and the campaign have done what many in this place only wish we had been able to do. They secured two legislative changes: ending sale blocking, and shifting pitch fees from RPI to CPI, which the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) spoke about. Sonia and the Park Home Owners Justice Campaign have driven lots of the work that is happening here. Another petition is going to Downing Street later today. I was lucky to be able to present one to Downing Street last year, and I know that many of us are willing to submit them in future.

We need to be honest about what we are going to do. There is a consultation on the table, but lots of residents have been consulted before. I ask the Minister for a clear timeline for when we will see action, when we will have a conclusion with published responses, and when the 160,000 residents will get the fair deal that has been promised for so long but postponed for much longer.