Park Homes

Debate between Andrew Miller and Thérèse Coffey

Thursday 16th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) on bringing this matter to the House. I welcome and support her acknowledgment of the role of Lord Ted Graham, who has done magnificent work over many years on this difficult subject.

There are a number of park home sites in my constituency. I lost one and gained one as a result of the boundary changes at the last election. The one that I lost was in extremely good order, whereas the one that I gained is frankly a disgrace. The owner has persistently refused to maintain standards at a level that I regard as necessary for human safety. The electricity supply cabinets are his property, not that of the park home owners. He charges through the nose for the use of the meters, and yet they are unsafe. There has been a circular argument between the site owner, the householders, the local authority and various regulators about who is responsible. I have no doubt that the park owner is responsible. He provides the services at a rip-off price to residents, so he is responsible for ensuring that those services are provided in the manner that would be expected under any other leasehold arrangement. Many hon. Members live in properties that have leasehold arrangements and we should draw many parallels from the standards that we expect. That ought to be the point of guidance on which the law is based. I appreciate that there are differences, partly because the longevity of such structures is typically much shorter than that of brick and mortar properties, but the principle holds.

I like the notion of the fit and proper person, and think that we should work on it. There are some very responsible park owners, some of whom the all-party group has met over the years in their lordships House. We have met people who have had very good ideas about how to improve the relationship between tenant and landlord. We need to identify and build on best practice, and we should support and work with park owners who exercise it. At the same time, we must come down like a ton of bricks on the cowboys in the industry, who are not prepared to ensure that there is safe lighting so that people can get to their homes safely, and who enforce practices such as the hon. Lady described.

Selling scams, in particular, need to be examined carefully. If I own a piece of property and choose to sell it, the relationship should be purely between myself and the person who purchases it, although I appreciate that it happens to be parked on somebody else’s land.

I am pleased to see that my neighbour, the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr O'Brien), has just arrived. Following the boundary changes, he inherited a good park home site, although he has an interesting relationship with one of the tenants. I shall say no more about that. [Interruption.] It is one of his more challenging constituents, I think it is fair to say. Am I right? He is nodding.

If a property conforms to the existing rules of the park, the landlord should have absolutely no right to interfere in the question of who the seller can seek to pass the property on to. If it breaches the rules of the site, that is a different matter. That is the same in conventional leasehold arrangements, because if a property has not been maintained to the required standard—for example, in its external decoration—the landlord can put pressure on the individual living there. A few estate agent or lawyerly-looking people on the Conservative Benches are nodding in agreement with that. Those principles are well established in landlord and tenant relationships, so why do we seek to make the matter complicated?

I say to the Minister that in considering what revisions are necessary—I think all parties agree that revisions are needed—we should start by considering how conventional leaseholders in bricks and mortar properties are treated and ask ourselves what changes would bring about a set of rules that will work for park homes. At the same time, we need to protect the interests of decent park owners and address the challenges that the hon. Lady described.

On the site to which I referred, the owner calculates the electricity bill in quite an interesting way. One resident has written to me stating that the cost of electricity is generally between £2 and £3 a unit, which is pretty pricey. I know that the Government have driven up the price of fuel, but not by that much. It seems extraordinary that utilities can be charged at a price that is frankly exorbitant. If investments have to be made across the landlord’s property, it is perfectly reasonable that tenants should make a contribution in the same way that anyone else in that situation would have to. However, for them to be charged for utilities at not just a premium price but a rip-off price seems absolutely wrong. That is another matter that I ask the Minister to consider.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

I was under the impression that electricity and mains gas were covered by regulations to be enforced by Ofgem. There is much more of a problem with oil and liquefied petroleum gas, on which there is no protection at all for consumers in park homes. I have been struggling to get an answer from Government Departments on that point. The matter that the hon. Gentleman raises is a real problem, and I hope that the Minister and his colleagues will consider it.

[Andrew Miller]

I am not sure about gas, because no gas is provided in the homes in question apart from bottled gas. In that particular case, the landlord has a central meter and one can see how much electricity is being used on the whole site, but each property has a sub-meter. That worries me intensely, because he appears—I do not know whether this is correct—to be able to charge whatever he chooses for the renting of the meter, which is a nice way of marking up the price. That may be how he gets away with the price, and perhaps we need to reflect on that detail.

Such little scams, added together, mean that people who are trying to live frugally in properties that are not worth a huge sum are being presented with bills that creep up and up. The House should be in the business of seeking to protect those people, because they are among the most vulnerable. The lady who wrote to me has put her head above the parapet and been prepared to take on the park owner, and I commend her for that. She gets every possible support that I can give her, including working with the local authority, trading standards and so on. However, people in such situations are predominantly those who do not have the capacity to take on landlords who make legal threats such as those that the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole mentioned. She talked about a rule being changed the day after a purchase was refused, and in such cases people do not have either the money or the experience to take on the case, so they need the House’s support.

I urge the Minister, and my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) in working with the Minister, to try to find a set of rules that commands the support of the whole House. I urge him to start his search by examining how the rest of the leasehold world operates and considering whether we can learn from the experience of changes in that sector over the past 20 or 30 years. We need to improve the lot of the particularly vulnerable constituents whom we are all seeking to represent this afternoon.