Park home residents rally over 'legal theft of equity'

Park home owners have to pay a 10% fee to site owners when they sell their properties

Park home residents are holding a rally at Westminster in a bid to overturn a law which forces them to pay a 10% fee from their home sales to site owners.

Organiser and park home owner Sonia McColl OBE, from Dorset, said the flat fee was a "legal theft of equity".

About 85,000 people live on 2,000 residential park homes in England, defined as mobile homes on static sites covered by the 1983 Mobile Homes Act.

People have travelled to London from across the country.

Residents from Cornwall, Dorset, Hampshire, Surrey, Stafford, West Midlands, Windsor, Yorkshire, Sussex and Wiltshire are among those handing in a petition into Downing Street before an audience with MPs at Westminster.

Sir Christopher Chope MP has a private member's bill currently going through Parliament which aims to reform how charges for pitching mobile homes are calculated.

It was given a series of unopposed readings earlier this month.

'Sit with blankets'

The current 10% fee on the sale of a park home was "money in the site owner's pocket for doing absolutely nothing", Ms McColl said.

"We consider it to be the legal theft of our equity," the Purbeck homeowner added.

One of the residents' other concerns has been the annual fee increases are calculated at the older Retail Price Index (RPI) rather than the Consumer Prices Index (CPI).

The protesters are also lobbying over the absence of the £400 winter fuel payment which they said park home owners are yet to receive.

Linda Poxon lives in a park home in Hordle, Hampshire, and is on a pre-pay meter.

"I put £40 on again yesterday and it's going fast. We sit with blankets round us in the evening. My husband's on blood thinners and he feels the cold, it is very difficult," she said.