Analysis of responses to consultation on mobile home sites regulations

Introduction

This report presents an analysis of responses to the Scottish Government's consultation on their proposals for regulations supporting the new licensing system for mobile home sites with permanent residents.

Background

In 2012 the Scottish Government consulted on proposals to strengthen the licensing system. After further development these proposals were taken forward in Part 5 of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2014. The 2014 Act set the framework for a new system for licensing mobile home sites licensed to have permanent residents. Some of the key measures in the Act are:

• Introducing new processes for handling first site licence applications, renewals, transferring a licence, and transmission of a licence.
• Introducing a requirement that someone holding site licence and/or managing a site is a 'fit and proper' person to do so.
• Giving a local authority a range of enforcement powers. These include the ability to serve penalty notices and enforcement notices on a site licence holder.
• Enabling a local authority to be able to revoke a site licence in certain circumstances.
• Providing for a sheriff to appoint an interim manager to run a site, in certain circumstances.
• Allowing a local authority to charge a fee for handling an application to issue a first site licence application, or renew an existing licence.

The 2014 Act gives Scottish Ministers powers to make regulations, setting out in more detail how some parts of the new licensing system will work. In 2015 the Scottish Government published a consultation paper setting out what it proposed to include in these regulations. The consultation ran from 17 November 2015 to 12 ^th February 2016 and asked 11 main questions.

Profile of respondents

A total of 31 consultation responses was received. Two of these responses came from the same organisation and have been combined into one response, leaving 30 responses for the analysis presented within this report.

Of these 30 responses, 17 were submitted by groups and 13 by individual members of the public. A profile of respondents by type is set out in Table 1 below. A list of the groups that submitted a response to the consultation is included as Annex 1 to this report.

Table 1: Standard responses received by type of respondent

The majority of responses (17 out of 30) were submitted by groups or organisations. A further 13 responses were received from individual members of the public.

Structure of the report

The remainder of this report presents a question-by-question analysis of responses given at each of the questions set out in the consultation document.

The results from the closed questions (yes/no, agree/disagree etc.), are presented in tabular form. At Questions 3 and 8 summary results have been included within the main report with full results provided at Annex 2.