Joint Efforts

All tidied up from the removal of the little office, the park is looking good now. A lot of work by the residents themselves though with the neighbour of the old office site even power-washing the empty pitch. There was a meeting with our MP (nice chap) to bring him up to date with all the happenings. There has been a great spell of summer weather and this encouraged the sporty types and a badminton net appeared. There was a lot of activity that was probably regretted the following day. I hear there may be a site tournament when the sun returns and the winner will have proved themselves fit for snow-clearing duties this winter!

Office & Fur

The little office has trundled away with a bit of debris left behind. Hopefully tidied up soon. Superb few days weather and time to enjoy a coffee on the patio - where we spotted what we thought was an otter but turned out to be 3 mink. Seems there is some project at the moment to reduce the numbers of them in the area.

No mates for Bill and Ben

Weeds removed by the Team on Friday so the park looking much better now. Also their boss saying good things so we feel a bit better. Superb sunny weekend and a superb place to be beside the river, ducks and folks floating past and peace and quiet.

Who said What

The results from the consultation (on proposed changes to the Mobile Homes Act) have been published and are worth having a look through. So the final proposals will be influenced by this as I understand. Waiting now to hear comments on the responses.....

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment/Housing/privateowners/Residentialmobilehomes

Be part Of Better

Met with MSP today and had interesting discussion about the progress of amendments to the Mobile Homes Act and the recent Policy Cosultation Paper. It will be interesting to read what feedback was received due to the consultation and hopefully this will influence the final amendment in a positive way. It is a fine balance of course between the parks remaining a viable proposition for owners and giving the residents a fair deal and security. All the stakeholders had an opportunity to respond to the Paper and this will make it particulaly worth seeing the detail. The timescale of the implementation of the amendment is also encouranging as a draft SSI exists it could become law by end of year or early next. Lets hope it is worth waiting for and that it has some way of being enforced.

Want to buy a KWh?

Still struggling with this idea of paying 23p for each unit of electricity we use. Looking around all the providers sites I can't see anything that works out as high as this, well perhaps for the first bunch of units but then a drop to a lower charge for the rest. When they sort out the 20% VAT they are charging on and remove the climate levy it should go down a bit admittedly. I asked a friend on mine that has a fairly large caravan site and their units work out at 8p for the pitches and 17p for the business units. This is just dividing the total bill by the number of units used. It is a tricky situation really as the residents have no say over the provider that is chosen or the pricing plan so what can we do but trust this is the best deal - at the moment it does not feel like it.
On a positive front the weeds were sprayed yesterday so maybe they will keel over soon, if the rain today didn't wash them clean that is. There is a bunch of Japanese Knotweed lurking on the river bank - now that is an impressive weed! I'm sure it followed me through the park the other night.

Need for change

Before buying a park home I spent a long time looking around the Internet to get an idea of how secure we would feel living on a park. There is a lot of negative information but I thought we would be really unlucky to find ourselves with an unscrupulous park owner. Also after reading through the Mobile Homes Act I felt reasurred although there were some aspects that still worried me or that I felt were unfair.
We went ahead and have a lovely place to stay that is not too costly to run and over the last two years has been almost all we had hoped for. A change of owners seemed to be encouraging, as anything I could find out about them looked positive. I hope our experiences so far are not typical of what we can expect in the future.

I'm not saying that buying a park home is a bad idea, we are still very pleased with what we have bought and where we live. All we expect is that all legalities are observed and we are treated with some consideration and really just as a valued customer. Something is needed in the Act that covers these homes in a fair way that still allows the owners to make a profit while protecting and enforcing the rights of the residents.