CARAVAN RATING (Hansard, 30 July 1975)

§ Dr. Edmund Marshall (Goole)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the law in respect of the rating of caravans. Such a Bill is necessary to resolve—

§ Mr. Charles Fletcher-Cooke (Darwen)
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. It was said that the Leader of the House would be making a statement about the revised form of business. He has now disappeared.

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. There will be a Business Statement tomorrow. Thursday is the day for a Business Statement.

§ Dr. Marshall
Such a Bill is necessary to resolve the confusing situation which has arisen this year over the rating of holiday caravans which remain at their holiday sites all the year round. I expect that most hon. Members will have heard about this problem from constituents owning such holiday caravans who, when visiting their caravans for the first time this year, discovered that a rating proposal, and in many cases a rates demand, had been made in respect of their individual caravans.
Altogether there are 4,300 holiday caravan sites in England and Wales, with over a quarter of a million caravans. Until 1st January 1975 all but 80 of these sites were rated as single hereditaments. Because of a decision of the courts back in 1966, rating and valuation officers are now required to treat each individual caravan as a separate hereditament in the valuation list. A corresponding court decision in Scotland was made in 1974. It is the impact of those legal decisions which has hit caravan owners this year.
Previously, when each site was rated as a whole, the site owner paid the rates to the local authority and passed on this expense to caravan owners as part of their normal site rental. In none of the cases I know of where caravans are now rated separately have I heard of the site rental being correspondingly reduced. These caravan owners, therefore, are faced with the prospect of having to pay rates on their caravans twice over.
1825 Furthermore, the valuations now determined for separate caravans when totalled for a particular site are generally much in excess of the previous single valuation for the site as a whole. For instance, prior to this year's change, a group of eight caravan sites in the Tendring district Essex had a total rateable value of £28,000. With the change to individual caravan rating, the total has risen to £96,000. This has come about independently of any general rating revaluation. Perhaps some of the finer points of rating and valuation practice are involved here and have brought about this strange result, but these are technicalities which the caravan owner in general cannot be expected to appreciate.
Many owners of holiday caravans are not well endowed financially. The new additional rates are adding hardship to confusion for them. Some owners are thinking of selling their caravans and others are towing them around on the congested roads to the coast rather than leaving them fixed and thereby rateable.
Equally anxious over the new situation are the local authorities—numbering 159 altogether in England and Wales—which are required to collect the rates on these caravans. The district authorities all round our coastline have to bear the administrative brunt of the problem, calculating and delivering rate demands for each individual caravan. The problems involved are Herculean, particularly when details of caravan ownership are difficult to obtain or when caravans charge hands or are moved round the same site.
One local authority, the East Lindsey District Council, covering the whole Lincolnshire coast between the Humber and the Wash, has had an extra 21,000 hereditaments added to its rating list, an increase of 45 per cent., because of the change in the rating of caravans Any extra revenue which could accrue to such an authority will be largely offset by the 1826 cost of collection and by the corresponding reduction in the resources element of the late support grant it receives from the Government. The Association of District Councils strongly supports the treatment of holiday caravan sites as single hereditaments.
The Bill which I am now seeking leave to introduce would tackle this problem simply by amending the law to reverse the court decision in 1966 in the case of Field Place Caravan Park Limited v. Harding. The Bill will not exempt holiday caravans from rates, so there is no question of giving caravaners an unfair advantage over other holiday home owners.
The Bill will simply require sites to be rated as whole hereditaments, which is the position which in general obtained before this year. I regard the Bill as a straightforward application of common sense to a confusing and anomalous situation. I shall pursue the objectives which I have described as far as I have opportunity to do so, and I now ask the House to make one such opportunity available to me.