Criminalising squatting: Is it worth it?
- By Jack Hewson
- Thursday, 9 February 2012 at 12:00 am
- http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/09/criminalising-squatting-is-it-worth-it/
The same scare-mongerers tell us that the current law is inadequate to deal with the problem. There is a public fear that you could come home to find a family of people supping your wine and be powerless to do anything about it. It is in this climate that the push to criminalise squatting has found traction. If approved clause 130 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill (LASPO) will leave squatters open to a maximum one year jail sentence or £5000 fine.
Advocates of the new law see it as a necessary deterrent to protect property owners against opportunist squatters. But those who oppose it claim the measures are ill thought-out and would only criminalise the homeless and empower exploitative landlords.
Pushing to shelve the clause in the House of Lords today Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer will argue that the current law is perfectly adequate and that criminalisation would slow down legal procedure and saddle the tax-payer with the bill.
“Because it’s a slightly ugly word and because people are slightly scared of squatters people don’t have that instant sympathy. But I’m hoping that the two rational arguments: one, why are we spending money on this and two, that there is adequate legislation in place already, will change hearts and minds,” she said earlier this week.
At present squatting is dealt with under civil law which deals with disputes between individuals. If you find someone squatting your house you have to foot the bill to turf them out. But if squatting becomes a criminal offence it becomes “a crime against the state”. This means the crime of squatting would be prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and paid for by the taxpayer.
“In the Legal Aid Bill, everything in it is to do with cuts, everything is to save money. This is one of the only [clauses] which involves spending millions more. It sits very oddly in a bill which is all about reducing costs,” she said.
There is a misperception that most “victims” of squatting are homeowners without the resources to pay for expensive evictions. In actual fact it is a scenario far more commonly faced by landlords.
“If you’re a landlord with a few houses, spending a few hundred pounds on a possession order to evict squatters is annoying, but in a bill where we’re cutting legal aid to families and children why are we bailing out landlords?” said Baroness Miller.
So what then of all these poor people who’ve had their homes invaded? Surely the Daily Mail doesn’t just make these stories up?
Although it’s true that private property owners have fallen victim to opportunist squatters, in actual fact nearly all of such cases were of occupations of empty properties which had recently been bought or inherited. This of course isn’t something to be scoffed at. If it happened to me I’d be livid.
But how commonly does this occur and is Baroness Miller right when she says the current law is adequate to deal with the problem?
What most people don’t realise is that squatting somebody’s home is already a criminal offence under the Criminal Law Act 1977. Under the act a resident pushed out of their home is classed as a “displaced residential occupier” (DRO), or if they are intending to move into the property, a protected intended occupier (PIO). Removing squatters in these circumstances ought to be quick and easy but often the law is misunderstood even by the Police themselves.
“You can get squatters out of residential properties in a couple of days,” said specialist housing barrister Justin Bates, who is one of 170 legal professionals who signed an open letter to the Guardian protesting against media distortion of the squatter issue. “I don’t think that any trespasser or squatter I’ve ever evicted can have cost my client more than a couple of hundred quid.”
But what about these horror stories I’ve heard in which evictions take weeks and cost thousands of pounds?
“Am I saying every single person in the country gets their squatter out for £300 and in two weeks? No of course not. But what I don’t know is how they arrived in that situation. Did they get some bad advice? I don’t know what lawyers they consulted and what they were told,” said Mr Bates.
There is no aggregated data on the number of DRO or PIO cases going through the courts in England every year, but according to Mr Bates they are rare.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done one,” he said. “I think from talking to friends who signed that letter in the Guardian, out of the 170 of us, [there were] maybe ten [instances] that we know of. Partly because I really don’t think this spate of residential squatting is actually going on.”
Perhaps one of the most absurd peculiarities of the proposed legislation is that it is likely to lengthen the time it takes to evict squatters. Prosecuted under civil law squatters can be removed with an interim possession order in just a couple of days, but going through the CPS this could take weeks.
The only DRO case that I am aware of – that of Julia High, who did actually return home to find a family of Romanian gypsies sitting in her living room last year – was processed in less than 24 hours.
Is it wise to complicate what is already an effective procedure?
Regardless of the impracticalities of actually enforcing a new law, clause 130 of LASPO could also cause considerable hardship for a lot of very vulnerable people.
If the legislation comes into force it would allow dodgy landlords use the police to evict tenants by claiming that they are squatters. Many people at the bottom of the rental market would be open to exploitation. Thousands of Britain’s homeless population could also be affected – 40 per cent of single homeless people have squatted at some point, all of whom could be open to a criminal record under these plans.
On some levels it seems like an open and shut case – there ought to be a criminal sanction against people trying to use what’s not theirs. But the implications of criminalisation go way beyond providing retribution for a handful of disgruntled homeowners.
Is it really worth it?
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