High-cost Credit
Debate between Richard Graham and Justin Tomlinson(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a series of powerful points, as did the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) and my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker). He has not touched on the role of credit unions, but perhaps he is going to do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester raised the issue of capacity. Is my hon. Friend aware that Lloyds bank has given considerable help to the Gloucestershire credit union and is thinking of providing even more help not only to our credit union, but to others around the country? There are opportunities for MPs to build capacity in their credit unions.
Justin Tomlinson
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, because it relates to my very next point and means that I now have longer than seven seconds to summarise that.
The Government should do more to promote a savings culture to prevent consumers from finding themselves in positions of stress in which they do not have the time to make an informed decision. Also, as many Members have said, we should strengthen credit unions and examine innovative products that come along involving community-based people who know the interests of their local community. There are many good examples that we should champion.
Finally, we must consider the mainstream institutions. They were caught sleeping, and the market has changed. It has gone online. People do not necessarily want to turn up at a bank in a suit to justify themselves. The market developed because there was a gap and the consumer wanted online services. We all instinctively trust the traditional institutions to do a better job, but they need to be in a position to do so.
Apprenticeships (Small Businesses)
Debate between Richard Graham and Justin Tomlinson(13 years ago)
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Richard Graham
Yes. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that FE colleges have a critical role to play, as do some of the smaller, specialist training providers. A question for us all to consider—I am sure that my hon. Friend has done this in his own constituency—is the extent to which courses offered by further education colleges can be effectively tailored to the requirements of small businesses. Quite often, some of the courses—this is where the questions of the framework structure and the sector skills bodies come in—are fairly specific and technical, and small businesses often require an apprentice to take elements of a business administration course, elements of a marketing course and elements of other courses. So there is a question about whether there is an adequate structure of training to cater for small businesses, but I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that further education colleges have a crucial role to play.
Moving away from apprenticeships in general and their take-up nationally, and coming on to the small businesses sector specifically, I believe that there are just less than 5 million small businesses in the UK, of which more than 3.5 million have sole proprietors. An astonishing statistic is that 97% of UK companies employ fewer than 20 people, and 95% of them employ fewer than five people. That shows us that one of the key drivers in all our constituency economies is the extent to which small companies that employ fewer than five people feel able to take on an additional person.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
As a former small business owner myself, I recognise the challenges. For nine years, I wanted to get an apprentice, but I did not understand how to do so. The Government can play a proactive role in providing information to explain just how easy it is to recruit an apprentice. My suggestion, which I have raised on a number of occasions, is doing it through the annual business rates bill. All the information can be provided at a relatively low cost.
Richard Graham
That is an interesting suggestion, and one that I am sure the Minister will want to respond to in due course. The idea of using the annual business rates bill as an opportunity to explain how simple it is to take on apprenticeships would, I think, be widely appreciated. My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) is right, and I was just about to come on to the question of education and information. There is undoubtedly a gap that needs to be filled.
Park Homes
Debate between Richard Graham and Justin Tomlinson(13 years, 6 months ago)
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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.