Holiday Village Homes: your independent guide to park homes, static caravans and holiday lodges

So, what is a holiday village home, exactly? It's a general way of describing the family of prefabricated homes you'll find sited on licensed parks around the UK — park homes, static caravans and holiday lodges. Despite the name, none of them are towed about like a touring caravan; once they're placed on a pitch, they stay put, connected to services and usually skirted at the base so they look and live like a proper home.

Legally, all of these are still classed as a "caravan", and that word comes with a size limit: a caravan is capped at 20 metres in length, 6.8 metres in width and 3.05 metres of internal height. A twin-unit home — the wider style many people picture when they think of a park home — has to be built from no more than two transportable sections that are joined together on site.

What a holiday village home is for — full-time residential living, or holidays and short breaks — depends on the standard it's built to and the licence attached to the pitch it sits on, which is exactly what the next plot covers.

This is the single most important distinction in the whole guide, so it's worth getting straight: a holiday home and a residential park home are not the same thing, even though they can look almost identical from the outside.

Residential park homes are built to the British Standard BS3632, a stricter specification designed for year-round living. Holiday caravans are typically built to the lighter EN1647 standard, intended for seasonal or short-term use — though some holiday units are also built to the tougher BS3632 spec. It is unlawful to live full-time in a home that only meets the EN1647 holiday standard, because it simply isn't designed for permanent occupation.

The same split shows up at site level. Some parks hold a licence for residential or mixed use; others are conditioned by the local planning authority for "holiday use only", or for a set part of the year, such as 11 months out of 12. Parks with holiday-only or seasonal conditions generally aren't "relevant protected sites" under the Mobile Homes Act 1983, which matters a great deal for the legal protections covered in Plot 05.

One persistent myth worth clearing up: registering a holiday caravan for council tax does not make living in it full-time lawful. Council tax is a separate system from planning control, and an owner doing this can still face planning enforcement action.

Residential park home living is governed chiefly by the Mobile Homes Act 1983, which sets out 28 implied terms covering things like security of tenure, how pitch fees can be reviewed, and the process for selling the home. The current version of these implied terms took effect on 30 April 2011, and they were further amended by the Mobile Homes Act 2013.

One of the best-known implied terms concerns resale commission: under the Mobile Homes (Commissions) Order 1983, a site owner can take up to 10% commission when a park home is resold — a rate that has stood unchanged in England since it was reduced from 15% back in 1983. Wales has taken a different path: in 2018, the Welsh Government decided to taper the commission down by one percentage point a year over five years, to a maximum of 5%, so the position there now differs noticeably from England's 10%.

There is one notable exception to commission altogether: a park home owner can assign — effectively gift — their pitch agreement to a qualifying family member, such as a spouse, parent, child, grandparent, grandchild or sibling, without any commission being payable, since no sale has taken place.

Commission is a genuinely contested topic. A 2022 government-commissioned study found that if the 10% resale commission were abolished outright, pitch fees would likely rise by an estimated 20–32% to compensate site owners — a reminder that costs in this sector tend to move around rather than disappear.

For sites that fall under this protection at all, the local authority must license them under the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960, alongside planning permission for residential or mixed use. Two trade bodies are worth knowing: the British Holiday & Home Parks Association (BH&HPA), the national trade body for caravan holiday, touring, residential and chalet parks, and the National Caravan Council (NCC), founded in 1939, which represents manufacturers, dealers, distributors and operators across the sector.