Leanne Millar with her horse Rama on the West Coast, where she is now moving back after she was offered accommodation. Photo / Leanne Millar
Leanne Millar with her horse Rama on the West Coast, where she is now moving back after she was offered accommodation. Photo / Leanne Millar
The woman evicted at short notice from a holiday park says she’s been overwhelmed with offers of support and kindness from strangers since her plight was made public.
The Herald on Sunday reported last week that Leanne Millar was given four hours’ notice to leave the relocatable home she owned, which was on a site she leased from the Queen Street Holiday Park in Richmond, near Nelson.
Since Millar was given notice and then trespassed on August 3 she has been living out of her car, and sleeping at a friend’s house.
Since the article ran she’s had offers of help from around the country. She will now return to the West Coast to take up secure, temporary accommodation.
The action has highlighted what one lawyer says appears “at first blush” to be a gap in the law for people who live in campgrounds. The Government says it has no plans to change it.
The Residential Tenancies Act was amended in 2019 to boost protection for people in make-shift accommodation but relocatable homes remained excluded from the updated law.
A spokesperson for the Associate Housing Minister, Barbara Edmonds told NZME that the Government was not currently considering amending the Residential Tenancies Act to cover these matters.
“Potential avenues for next steps in this [Millar’s] situation could include the Property Law Act, the Disputes Tribunal or courts for enforcing the two-year warranty of her unit.”
Millar was now seeking legal advice on how she might advance her case.
“I just want to know how it is I can be evicted from a home I own, and then be told I have to sell it.”
Millar says the reason she was evicted remained unclear, but she believed it had to do with inflammatory texts she sent to the holiday park management over faults with the unit that she needed to be fixed.
Leanne Millar paid $140,000 for this portable unit at the Queen Street Holiday Park. She was evicted with four hours' notice in August. Photo / Leanne Millar
Millar said the park’s management offered to sell it on her behalf, at a 5 per cent commission, but she declined.
Holiday park director Kelvin Price has not responded to requests for confirmation of this.
With no means with which to shift the relocatable home, and worried it might be moved off the site and dumped, Millar signed ownership to a family member.
Wellington lawyer Joshua Pietras, who practised in civil litigation, told NZME that anyone buying a mobile home they planned to live in had fewer rights than someone who bought something like a toaster from a store because they were not covered by the Consumer Guarantees Act.
Buyers might have rights under the Building Act, including implied warranties around weather-tightness and code compliance, however, this was “a little unclear” as a mobile home might not constitute a dwelling, Pietras said.
“That said, any building work that costs more than $30,000 must come with a written contract, and that requirement would probably apply here,” Pietras said of Millar’s situation.
Millar paid the holiday park $140,000 for the unit that was connected to power, water and gas.
Tenancy consultant Chris Matthews said a section of the Residential Tenancies Act excluded many tenant and landlord relationships from the protections of the Building Act, including those who occupied a cabin, caravan, vehicle, or other building structure in a camping ground.
“While landlords and tenants can choose to “contract back in” for coverage under the RTA, it’s unlikely campground owners would ever offer an agreement which provided that provision,” Matthews said.
Millar said there was no agreement or contract upon purchase – only a receipt to prove she had paid the money for the portable home.
Neither was transitional and emergency housing covered by tenancy law, if the housing was funded either by a government department or under the Special Needs Grants Programme.
The Ministry of Social Development confirmed that the Queen Street Holiday Park has previously received an emergency housing special needs grant, but was currently not supplying any such housing.
Leanne Millar has been living out of her car and with a friend since she was evicted last month from the Queen Street Holiday Park in Richmond. Photo / Tess Jaine
Pietras also said it’s possible that because Millar had lived at the camping ground for longer than 50 days, it might be deemed a residential tenancy, in which case the campground owners would be subject to the same obligations as landlords under the Residential Tenancies Act.
“If that is the case, a tenant who is evicted on four hours’ notice should theoretically be able to challenge their eviction in the Tenancy Tribunal and seek exemplary damages for other breaches of the RTA.”
NZME has also approached Opposition housing and justice spokespeople, and Nelson MP Rachel Boyack, none of whom responded.
Nelson’s National candidate Blair Cameron wasn’t able to comment on Millar’s case in particular, but he “absolutely wanted to see an end to these sort of housing issues”.
He said National’s recently announced social housing policy made it clear it wanted to see community housing providers “powered up” to provide more secure housing to those most in need, instead of having to use holiday parks and motels.
Kelvin Price initially declined to comment but has since contacted NZME to say that in Millar’s case, he didn’t believe it was a residential tenancy, and the holiday park was not obliged to comply with the provisions of the Residential Tenancy Act. It was however obliged to follow the provisions of any agreement between the parties, to comply with the resource consent and with the Camping-Grounds Regulations 1985, which Pricebelieved it had done.
He said management did not take any steps to ask anybody to leave the property without considering all the alternatives available.
Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.
