Public Health (Coronavirus) (Protection from Eviction and Taking Control of Goods) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Mann Excerpts

Tuesday 8th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in summing up, will the Minister comment on the question of tied accommodation? Where someone has lost their employment and is then required to vacate a property, there will be a time lag because, by definition, it will not be possible, if you have made someone redundant, to employ somebody new to live in said accommodation. Therefore, there is an incentive to take one’s time in the eviction or disposal of the tenant. It seems to me that that time lag is fairly obvious. What data do the Government have on this, and what plans do they have around tied accommodation?

There is a second group that, in my experience, always gets left out when it comes to legislation on housing rights: those who live in mobile homes that are not mobile. I refer to park homes. With a park home, what people do, in my experience, is purchase, usually relatively cheaply, a so-called mobile home, but rent the space it is on and pay a significant premium for other services—these usually being lighting, which may or may not be where it is meant to be, a tarmac surface in and out of the park-home area, and sometimes heating and other such utilities. An eviction there is an eviction from the space that a person rents, but of course most of these mobile homes are not mobile. They may have been sitting there for 40 years, with the concrete encased into the land, having developed over time. Therefore, the concept that you can dig it up and move it is often used to force people out or to put their rent up—that has been my experience. Coercion based on a lack of housing rights forces the rent up, precisely because people have a capital asset—albeit one that does not really compare to housing as an asset—that they can never capitalise because they are stuck to that particular location.

It seems to me that that there will be an increase in that Covid-related problem. I suspect, from my reading, that this legislation does not apply. What plans do the Government have in that kind of situation to ensure that the same Covid-problem rights will be there for those in mobile homes and those in immobile mobile homes, otherwise known as park homes?