Lord Cormack
Main Page: Lord Cormack (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Cormack
My Lords, I follow the noble Lord, Lord Best, with great pleasure. I endorse all that he said. We are very much in his debt for piloting this Bill through your Lordships’ House. I have had a very long association with mobile homes. I shall say in parenthesis that my only criticism of the Bill is its title. I wish it were the Park Homes Bill.
I have a long association with park homes. At one stage, I was told that there were more sites in my constituency of South Staffordshire than in any other constituency in the country. I had many long and agreeable conversations with my friend the noble Lord, Lord Graham, when we used to meet to talk about the plight of the home owners. This is the thing that we have to underline in this debate time and time again: we are talking about home owners, people who have invested, sometimes their pension lump sum, sometimes the product of a lifetime of saving, in a modest home in the country. Some of these homes are quite palatial, but most are modest, scrupulously clean and very well looked after. Their owners take great pride in them. There were no communities in South Staffordshire that were truer communities than the park home sites. In some of them residents and owners spent hours every week making sure that not just their own gardens were tidy, precise and attractive but that the whole site was beautifully kept.
For the first 30 years of my 40-year membership of the other place, I had very few complaints from owners of park homes about the activities of site owners. Then in the last decade of my membership of the other place, I had a very great number of complaints about two or three unscrupulous owners in particular, whose practices not only verged on, but sometimes became, criminal. The noble Lord, Lord Best, spoke of intimidation. Intimidation can take many forms. The knock on the door in the night was not unknown, with no one there when the door was opened. Dogs, rather fierce ones, prowling around were not unknown. The blocking of sales, which the noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to, was quite frequent, an appalling exploitation of the provision by which the park home owner is able to veto the prospective purchaser. There were so many other things. The noble Lord, Lord Best, talked of drainage not being repaired and of excessive fees being charged for fuel. I know of one site called Silver Poplars. Many of the trees around it were, not surprisingly, poplars. In the course of one particularly disturbing weekend, most of them were chopped down. The anguish and distress caused to the home owners at the despoliation of their very attractive rural environment was palpable.
These are people who, for the most part, want nothing more than to live a tranquil life in a place of quiet and tranquil beauty without being interfered with by anyone. The way in which some of these owners behaved was such that it became absolutely necessary for important legislation to be produced. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Graham, and I go back a long way. We remember the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, introducing the first Bill many decades ago. It was the beginning of the recognition of the need for some form of regulation, but the problems that we talk about today did not exist then and the provisions of that Bill are not adequate to deal with them. We now need an Act that can be enforced and can make these people—and let us stress that they are still a minority of site owners—realise that what they are doing will land them in very deep trouble indeed.
I know that in South Staffordshire there are still many owners. Indeed, the council owns a very good site called Hinksford. There are many sites where the owners live in the most amicable relations with the home owners—that is good and as it should be. But these few people have given such extraordinary anguish to so many home owners that they have to be dealt with. I am delighted to know that my noble friend Lady Hanham, who will be replying to this debate, has already indicated her sympathy for what we seek to do.
Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, indicated in his closing remarks, there are still problems that will have to be solved in future. The Bill is not the answer to every conceivable problem. There will be some unscrupulous people who will seek loopholes in this legislation, and may be successful in so doing—if they are, we will have to deal with them. It is not right that a particular group of home owners in our country should be treated as badly as Rachman treated his tenants all those decades ago. These are the Rachmans of the mobile home world; they do not deserve a place in any civilised society—they deserve to be hounded out of what they are doing, to be fined unlimited sums and to be put in jail for the way in which they disturb, despoil and ruin the lives and environment of so many decent, ordinary people, who want nothing more than to live in peace with their neighbours.
As your Lordships will have gathered, I am a passionate supporter of this Bill. I hope that we can reach the stage where we talk more of park homes and less of mobile homes. In his opening words, the noble Lord, Lord Best, indicated that they are static—they are not the sort of homes that are dragged around the country—and are not to be confused with those taken from site to site. They are permanent dwellings, owned by those who live in them, who deserve all the rights and protection that the owner of a long lease deserves and, for the most part, enjoys. I hope that this day marks the beginning of a new chapter for those living in those homes and that the Bill speedily goes on to the statute books—and that there will be no delay about its enforcement, or complications arising therefrom. The noble Lord, Lord Best, talked about April next year. I hope that in the next decade what park home owners like dear Mr Joyce in my former constituency—
Lord Cormack
Yes, Ron Joyce, known to the noble Lord, Lord Graham. I hope that what they have struggled for comes to pass. I was particularly proud and pleased when they formed one of the first park homes associations and I became their patron. It was an office that I was delighted and honoured to hold, because they were good people who deserved the support of those of us responsible for these things. Any society that is to call itself civilised must have regard for those who are most vulnerable and least able to create their own form of protection. In this Bill, we have gone a long way to doing that for them. I pay tribute to Peter Aldous for all that he did in the House of Commons and all the Members there, on both sides of the House, who gave it support, and all colleagues in your Lordships' House who are here today to see the Bill go on to its next stage in its progress towards its statute books. The noble Lord, Lord Best, has performed a signal service for us all, and we are grateful to him.