Mobile Homes (Requirement for Manager of Site to be Fit and Proper Person) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I also welcome the broad thrust of these proposals. I pay great tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Best, for persevering with his Private Member’s Bill. I note that the first review took place in 2017; it seems important that there be another review in another three years at an absolute maximum.

I do not want to repeat what the noble Lords, Lord Kirkhope, Lord Best and Lord Campbell-Savours, have said, but they made very valid comments. I shall just say that I was a leader of a local authority for a number of years, and we always had problems with the Gypsy community. That is going back quite a few years; nevertheless there are still challenges in that area, and I wonder how the local authorities will be able to deal with those challenges. It is not too far-fetched to think that they will still be wrestling with the results of Covid-19 in the early part of 2021. If that is the situation—and we debated earlier today the roles of local authorities, which are very extensive in relation to Covid-19—I just wonder whether those local authorities are going to have the resources and, more importantly, the skill to do the job. My noble friend on the Front Bench may well remember that in the early days of health and safety regulations, the key problem was the lack of skilled manpower at a local authority level to carry out the relevant objectives.

Finally, I used to own a mobile home in France, although my daughter owns it now. The French had a similar problem to ours, not to the extent of the Traveller community but in general terms. They produced a special tax, a sort of extra rate, called the taxe d’habitation, to finance qualified people to do proper inspections of these sites. With that, I will support what is proposed this afternoon.