Change to Pitch Fee Uprating Under the Mobile Homes Act 1983: Island Communities Impact Assessment Screening

Objectives

The Mobile Homes Act 1983 (“1983 Act”) (and related regulations) control the “consumer” rights of mobile home-owners. It sets out terms which must appear in the “written statement”. These include the arrangements for changing pitch fees. At present the presumption is that pitch fees do not change by more than the increase or decrease in the Retail Prices Index (RPI). The proposal is to change this to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), primarily because RPI is no longer judged to be a reliable measure of inflation^[1].

The Housing (Scotland) Bill (“Bill”) proposes the following amendments to the 1983 Act:

• Changes the basis of pitch fee uprating from the RPI to the CPI for existing and future contracts;
• Updates the mechanism for making changes to the inflation index in future to be secondary legislation, to facilitate timely changes as required; and
• Provides protection for residents should a site owner seek to undertake activity to compensate for the loss of income as a result of the change to indexation.

The Bill also adjusts section 5 of the 1983 Act to remove references to gypsy and traveller sites that are no longer needed as a consequence of previous changes to the law in relation to these sites.

The policy objective is to ensure that the protections relating to pitch fee uprating for residents on permanent licenced residential mobile home sites remain fair, appropriate and in line with development of statistical measures of inflation. The proposed changes will affect residents living on sites licenced as permanent residential sites and Gypsy/Travellers on public Gypsy/Traveller sites. It will involve administrative changes to documentation in relation to annual pitch fee setting by site owners and does not have a geographical dimension or relate directly to practical service delivery.