Interesting one. Seems to me there wouldn’t have been any issues if they’d have just built what had been approved.
Not really a mobile home is it? Not like the park homes you see dotted about the place. I doubt very much it was brought to site in two halves, craned into position, and bolted together like many park homes are. Looks much more like it’s simply a timber framed house. The panels were probably shop produced and brought to site in sections, but what they effectively seem to be doing is calling it a temporary moveable space to circumvent planning law, which it clearly isn’t.
They also seem to be implying that building it “on a plinth” somehow makes it a caravan
. Pretty much every timber framed building is built on a masonry plinth to DPC level, otherwise, well, it’s going to rot, isn’t it?
If it’s truly “moveable”, then it isn’t going to cost them £60k to have it demolished. Stick an advert on eBay - buyer arranges dismantling and transport, it’ll be gone in no time.
There is a possibility that they have been badly advised by the supplier of the building, but I bet there will be something in their Ts and Cs that states it is the buyer’s responsibility to comply with all permissions and restrictions.
The article also states that they got retrospective planning permission to convert the garage in 2018. That implies that the garage had already been converted, which I can only assume it hadn’t been as if that were the case why then build a timber frame home?
Furthermore, they are apparently paying a mortgage on it. As you can’t get mortgages on mobile homes they either aren’t paying a mortgage, or the mortgage company is satisfied it’s actually a fully fledged timber framed house.
So many questionable statements in this article it’s hard to feel sorry for them. Even if their neighbours have no objections councils really don’t like to allow precedents to be set and often tend to come down hard on people who ignore or try to bend the rules.
Man Jailed For Refusing to Demolish Man Cave