Mobile home & holiday caravan legal advice on site responsibilities
I am seeking advice on behalf of the residents on my park on what additional course of action I can take in our current situation, after the collapse in the banking on one side of our site. Seven homes are threatened with immediate evacuation and as these are residential homes no one has any other homes to go to. Our home has been relocated to a safer position but I’m not happy with it: it’s as good as uninhabitable.
The park owners have not responded to the local authority engineers, our MP, let alone any resident on this site. (That is both written correspondence and telephone calls.) Letters have been sent to the site licence authority, Environmental Protection Agency, all so far to no avail.
Is there any other course of action you could recommend for us to follow to get the park site owner to face up to his responsibilities?
Mobile home & holiday caravan legal advice on water resale
Are being charged correctly for water on our park? A few years ago, I filled a form from the local water supplier, to find out the amount of water I use in a year. It also covers sewage. This then equates to the amount of water rates you would be paying. On my park the site owner levies the water and sewage costs and we all pay the same, irrespective of the number of occupants in each home.
What prompted me to check this in the first place was that the rate went up by £23 per quarter (then £36 per quarter) and I thought something was amis. I contacted Ofwat, who advised me what the average water and sewage rate was in my area.
They said I should write to my park owner and request to see the overall water bill for the park, along with an explanation of how it is divided between the various properties and areas on the site.
Ofwat said that if I did not get a reply within a month I could then reduce my quarterly payments as follows: divide the average yearly rate for my area by two, then divide one half by four and pay one of these quarters per quarter during the year, until the following year’s rate change. This situation has been going on for some time and the total amount of alleged ‘arrears’ shown on my quarterly bills from the park owner stands at over £900. Ofwat has told me that the park owner cannot claim these alleged arrears.
What should I do now? Take the park owner to court to stop the quarterly accusations of arrears? Treat it as harassment under the 2004 Act? Or just ignore it and keep altering these quarterly invoices? The park owner’s solicitor did write to me once and I did reply, but I have heard nothing since. Any suggestions?
Mobile home & holiday caravan legal expert advice on privacy
I write asking your advice on two cameras installed on the park home opposite mine. I put it to the park owners that having cameras pointing at my home was intrusive and the camera angles were corrected. Now the cameras have been altered back again. I spoke with the park owners who said they were in touch with their solicitors for advice on the camera positions and viewing angles. This was eight weeks ago. Is there any other way to have the radius checked?
The resident now has security lights installed. The bulbs are set to cover a wide, high radius from that home.
At this time we do not have a manager on the park and the park owners say that the park can run itself. When we moved here five years ago I understood that it was a private residential park. Now the public can walk through, taking their dogs for walks.
Could this make a difference to the ground rent charges?
Mobile home & holiday caravan legal advice on road gritting
Every winter our park owner, who does not live on the site, allows our private road to ice up. With vehicle movements in and out, this eventually becomes like a skating rink. We do not have a residents’ association, but it is generally felt among fellow residents that the park owner believes that if he has the road gritted, he will be liable for any subsequent accident, such as people slipping and falling over. What can we do?
Mobile home & holiday caravan legal expert advice on park site rules
We have lived on our park for four years and when we purchased our home it came under the title of a private residential park home.
About two years ago the park was sold to a new owner. There has been a considerable amount of change, with a lot of new homes being added to the park (more than 1,000).
At the moment there are a number of chalets on the park, dating back to the original days when this was a caravan park. We have recently found out that the council has been putting DHSS benefits claimants into these chalets. At the moment we know of only people over 50, but they apparently know younger people who are also going to lose their homes through being unable to pay their mortgages and have told them to enquire here as well.
I’d like to know if the council and new park owner have the right to do this, as it is a private residential park.
The other question puzzling us is that although we have to have a car sticker to prove that we live here, when we walk in and out of the site nobody stops us to check that we live here.
We would have thought we should have some sort of ID or photo card to prove that we live here, as anyone can come in otherwise.
Mobile home & holiday caravan legal expert advice on electricity resale
I represent the residents on my park and some of them have a long running dispute over their pitch fees with the owners. Since 2003 they have been refusing to pay a £7 pitch fee increase that the owners wished to impose following the introduction of the Ofgem regulations. The owners have sent out subsequent annual pitch fee reviews in line with the RPI on that total amount. However, the residents never agreed to the initial increase and I am at a loss as to how to advise them.
It is true to say that any newcomers to the park after 2003 had this charge incorporated into their pitch fees and this is not in dispute. However the handful of residents still refusing to pay say they were informed at the time that this was an extra payment being made due to the loss of revenue after the Ofgem ruling. At that time, prior to 2003, it was not part of the pitch fee and these residents have reached no agreement with the park owners.
The park owners have said that our residents’ association advised members to pay up. After thoroughly scrutinising all the previous minutes of the meetings held this is certainly not the case. Members who did pay up did so of their own free will as they were increasingly worried about accumulating ‘arrears’. Originally 25 per cent of the residents were in dispute but now it is only five per cent.
As secretary of our residents’ association I am anxious to give the correct advice to residents. Do they ignore the demands and wait for a court action brought against them by the owners? Or, do they try to take action themselves through the courts? They are reluctant to do the latter due to the costs.
Mobile home and static caravan legal advice on utility bills
Our park was sold to new owners and our bills are going up as a result.
Our agreement with the previous owner was that water and sewage charges were included in the pitch fee. However the new owners are demanding that we pay a separate water charge on top of the pitch fee.
On electricity, the new park owners have put a £15 maintenance charge on our electricity bill. We paid the £80 electricity bill but have withheld the £15 maintenance charge, asking the park owners for a breakdown of their charges. They have totally failed to do this, but are demanding that we pay the £15.
On our camper van, we had an agreement with the previous owner that we could park if on our drive. Our plot is at the head of a cul-de-sac and the van is not in the way and does not block the view of any other home. We have had a letter from the new owners telling us to remove it and store it elsewhere
Mobile home and static caravan legal advice on selling your home
We have lived in our mobile home on a residential park for 12 years. In 1991 we decided to put an extension on the side of the mobile home. The extension is 4ft by 18ft.
The owners saw the extension going up but did not object or say that it was not allowed. We have been trying to sell the mobile home for 18 months and finally found a buyer, two months ago, who was willing to pay the asking price of £85,000.
The buyer had a survey done by a mobile home surveyor, who said it was fine.
The new owners of the park, who bought the park nine years ago, cancelled the sale, saying that the extension meant our home was not mobile. The owners then said we could live in it, but as soon as we moved the extension would have to be taken down and a new side would have to be put back. We said we could not afford to do that. The owners said that they could lose their park licence.
The park owners then offered to buy our mobile home from us for £15,000, which we agreed. We then signed to say that the owners would rent the mobile for £450 a month for four years to recoup the £15,000, then they would pull it down and put up a new one.
We realise we should not have put the extension up, but at no time since the owners bought the site did they say we had to take it down. We even bought a garage from the owners and they said it would put value on
the property.
When the park owners gave us the cheque they asked for our site agreement, which I handed over, but we don’t move out for another few weeks. Is that right?
We had no option but to accept the cheque, but on reflection we feel that they didn’t give us a reasonable offer. We would like your opinion on the matter please.
Graham Watts mobile home and static caravan legal expert advice on advertising
When we bought our home our park advertised that it had a clubhouse.
It is still being advertised and yet we have never had use of the clubhouse and we have been told it has been closed for several years. Can we claim back a percentage of our pitch fee and if so, how? The park owner has been known to say ‘if people want to sue me they can try’.
Graham Watts mobile home & holiday caravan legal expert advises on pitch fees when selling
The owners of our park, being among the better site owners, have reduced our pitch fee in line with the October RPI, which was 0.8 per cent - a reduction of 22p per week in my case, for 2010.
Recently two residents in our park have passed away, and the executors of their wills have sold the homes to the park owners at a reduced price, just to rid themselves of the responsibility of disposing of them, and naturally when the owners sell them on they will make a reasonable profit.
I have been looking at the legislation covering pitch fees and I know that if I sell my home direct to a prospective buyer, the park owners cannot increase the pitch fee that we are presently paying, but I cannot find anything that tells me what can happen when the park owners buy the home and then sell the home on. Are they allowed to increase the pitch fee as they would if they had removed the home and replaced it with a new one? I do know that this has happened on other sites, but I want to know if it is legal to do so.
