Evictions in the UK

Power, Housing, and Politics

Joe Crawford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000179897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Evictions in the UK examines the relationships between tenants, landlords, housing providers and government agencies and the tensions and conflicts that characterise these relations. The book shows how power dynamics are being reconfigured in the post-welfare context of the first quarter of the 21st century, as evictions for rent arrears are becoming one of the most significant threats to both the wellbeing of the social housing sector and the welfare of its tenants.

Embracing both practical and critical approaches, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of the contradictory and thus controversial issue of evictions. It explores the range of perspectives involved in the practice – landlords carrying out evictions, those agencies providing legal assistance to evictees, as well as academics and institutions charged with researching and regulating the process. Drawing on three case studies relating to evictions across Scotland and England, this book provides a comprehensive look at the punitive consequences of poverty (evictions for rent arrears) and status (evictions under immigration law) that are applicable to social housing systems worldwide. Based on original, primary-source data, this book will be a key resource for academics and students as well as policy makers and practitioners in the fields of housing studies, planning, social welfare, and political sociology.

Part I
The World of Housing

1 Evictions

Reflections from the Front Line

Exposition

The issue of evictions has always represented a significant social and economic problem in the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US) and much of Europe, and continues to do so today. Each and every year for the last decade in the UK’s social rented housing sector, around 20,000 forced removals have taken place out of around 80,000 eviction actions raised in court. With the role-out of Universal Credit, a benefit reform that sees rents go initially to tenants and not directly to landlords, the fears of vastly increasing arrears across the sector have already been voiced (Wilson, 2019). In fact, a number of representative bodies for social landlords have expressed their alarm at the impact that pilot areas have endured on rent arrears increases, with many housing associations claiming that they face economic difficulties as a direct result of the reform (Preece, 2018). Freedom of Information Act data obtained by Inside Housing magazine shows that even at this early stage, Universal Credit recipients are now twice as likely to face eviction for rent arrears as other tenants. It may be too early to tell for sure, but it does seem that evictions for rent arrears are about to become one of the biggest threats to both the wellbeing of the social housing sector, and the welfare of its tenants.

In order to introduce the subject of this book it is first necessary to locate myself within the overall assemblage of perspectives and practices that govern and determine evictions. I will begin the book with an exercise in epistemic reflexivity, but rather than turn the instruments of reason upon myself in an academic sense, I will temporarily ‘bracket’ or ‘suspend’ the scholastic gaze in order to capture the world I inhabited before I entered the academic field. Before taking up a reflexive position on homo academicus (explored further in Chapter 9), I start at the beginning by accounting for the world view of homo operator.

In undertaking such an endeavour, it is important to remain alert to the fact that there are, broadly speaking, three types of ‘perspectival bias’ that can blur the sociological gaze. The first is represented by the social origins of the researcher. This includes notions of class, gender, political or religious beliefs as well as ethnicity and status, largely determined by the location of the researcher within the wider social structure. This is presented in the first section of the book, and will represent the beginning of my own journey from practitioner to academic. The second bias that one has to be alert to, relates to the position that the researcher occupies, not in the social structure, but within the microcosm of the academic field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 38), which in my own case is the field of housing studies. The third bias concerns itself with the intellectualist perspective that can be problematic when the researcher fails to problematize their own relationship to reason. To begin, it is therefore necessary to provide an exposition of the political and social situation that I found myself in when I began my journey as a practitioner and when I made the transition to the world of academia.

‘Reports From the Front Line’

The front-line accounts are presented in and through two modalities. The first will be a factual account of my role as a Housing Aid Worker at Shelter in Glasgow and the second will involve fragments of the experience, communicated as a series of ‘reflections’, anecdotal stories that I would have recounted to an independent researcher, had I been interviewed as a research subject. Firstly, a contextual account of the environment from which this book’s central ideas were forged.

The ‘front line’ is located within the cut and thrust of daily life as a Housing Aid Worker, employed by the charity Shelter in Glasgow; a multifaceted role that involved among other things, preventing evictions, either directly or through advice and advocacy. The organisation Shelter emerged during a period of public outrage following the national screening of the Ken Loach film Cathy Come Home. The film, aired on the BBC in November 1966 to an audience of over 12 million, told the story of a young couple with children as they experience a series of harrowing injustices that resulted in homelessness and destitution. The gritty drama blurred the lines between fact and fiction as it told the harrowing story of overcrowded slum housing conditions, unscrupulous landlords, eviction caused by a lack of rights and a lack of state housing provision for the homeless. Shelter was launched in December 1966 and quickly set about campaigning for the introduction of rights that would prevent and alleviate homelessness. As well as being a campaign organisation, fighting for better rights and services for the homeless and badly housed, Shelter set up an advice and advocacy service.

As an organisation, Shelter expanded its remit, developing a number of functions. It began as a campaign group, lobbying for legislation to enshrine tenant’s rights in law, and has been an effective pressure group for the improvement of housing ever since. Opening Housing Aid Centres all over the UK Shelter built up a solid reputation for providing expert legal advice in what is an arcane and complex area of law. As well as delivering free legal advice and advocacy to anyone with housing problems, Shelter developed a range of roles to support their overall aims and objectives. These included: policy analyses and policy briefing papers in which staff assess housing and homelessness policy at both national and local level, and provide commentary and recommendations. Shelter also delivers training to a wide range of charities, teaching them the basics and providing education on the legal processes, the statutory obligations of landlords and the rights of tenants and homeless people.

Such is Shelter’s reputation for its unmatched expertise in the field that this training is also delivered to housing professionals, an enterprise that brings in an extra source of valuable funding. Shelter staff were also in demand as public speakers at events that ranged from high profile national conferences, to small-group talks and discussions as well as workshops. Its’ core activity however is to provide free advice and advocacy services to anyone who has a housing issue or finds themselves without accommodation or under threat of eviction. It does this through a casework system, where the staff take turns to be ‘on-call’ and to deal with cases as they come ‘through the door’ to their drop-in surgeries, or by telephone through the helpline service.

Reflections 1

I had just finished my postgraduate studies and really had no idea of what I wanted to do. I saw an advert for a Housing Aid Worker at the housing charity Shelter, bought Himsworth’s Scottish Housing Law text-book, and crammed for two weeks solid. Remarkably, I passed the entrance test and survived the interview, but it didn’t take them long to find out that I had basically ‘blagged’ my way in. It was a steep learning curve, made possible by the kind patience of my colleagues, and a very understanding boss. A joint Honours degree in History and Archaeology and a post grad in Russian Language isn’t the best preparation for working in a legal setting. It took me a while to fully appreciate the demands of this specialized working environment, with its specific procedures, practices and conventions.

Shelter’s principle solicitor, the housing law equivalent of Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones’s Diary, (hugely talented, massively understated and charmingly clunky in any social setting), often had to take me aside for a quiet word:

‘We will only win our cases with legal arguments’, he would remind me. ‘We use the law, and when the law proves ineffective as a means of resolving the case, we have to accept defeat. We let the case go. What we don’t do, ever, is resort to moral arguments. Asking a housing officer how they “sleep at night” is not how we best serve our client’s interests!’

It took a long time of being reminded of this before my resistance dissolved and I was eventually ‘indoctrinated’ into an exclusively legalistic approach to casework. I suppose I saw the problems relating to homelessness as having more than just a legal dimension. I saw them through a wider, ‘political’ lens. The lawyers did have a point though. When all was said and done, moral arguments were in fact, a very poor means of resolving our clients’ problems. But then again, more than the lawyers would like to admit, so too were the legal remedies.

The attraction of the job lay in the wide variety of tasks that had to be undertaken, from policy work, to training, delivering plenary talks at conferences, and being on call to deal with the day-to-day housing and homelessness issues of the general public. Of great importance is the work that Shelter does preventing homelessness from occurring in the first place. This is a vast and multi-faceted undertaking, which involves a wide range of interventions in a number of situations, and one that requires complex, long term strategic planning. The most significant, and certainly the most dramatic procedure for preventing homelessness from occurring, lies in the ability to stop evictions. The law governing evictions is complex and arcane, an area of legislation that was little understood by housing professionals, almost not at all by private sector landlords.

If you are a landlord and you want to end the tenancy, you have to issue the correct notices, at the correct times, with the prescribed information on them. These notices in themselves do not end the tenancy. In the social rented sector, the landlord will issue a notice of proceedings for recovery of possession. Then they have to seek a decree for eviction in the Court (Sheriff Court in Scotland). The Housing (Scotland) Act 2010 places a requirement on Sheriffs to satisfy themselves that the decree is the last resort, and that the eviction is ‘reasonable’, taking all things into consideration. These pre-action requirements are in the process of being extended to England and Wales. If the decree is granted the tenant(s) have 40 days to vacate the tenancy. Failure to do so within the timescale will result in Bailiffs in England and Wales and Sheriff Officers in Scotland being instructed to oversee a physical eviction. Leave willingly, or be forcibly removed by the police, most probably arrested and possibly charged with something akin to a public disturbance.

The rights of tenants are arcane because housing law is so different from other forms of legal competence. It is, so to speak, a world in its own right. In the private rented sector, the same logic applies but using a slightly different set of procedures. Depending upon what Act governs the tenancy, the landlord will have a sequence of procedures that must be followed for the process to be deemed lawful and legally competent. Failure to follow these procedures renders the process unlawful and the landlord loses the right to be able to carry out the eviction without committing a criminal offence. As is the case for social landlords the private sector landlord has to go to court, or in Scotland, a First Tier Tribunal, to obtain a decree for eviction.

Reflections 2

Our office was in Finnieston, a full decade before Finnieston became the most hip, trendy and gentrified part of town. Rundown and undesirable it may have been back then, but it was reasonably handy for Glasgow Sheriff Court, a geographical fact that was of the utmost importance. I cycled to work daily from the city’s Southside in all weathers, the added benefit of which was it afforded me the ability to stop an eviction that was due to take place with as little as 40 minutes to spare. That is, as little as 40 minutes before the housing team, accompanied by Sheriff officers and sometimes the police, turned up to carry out the eviction. Almost daily, a client (most often a woman) would appear at my drop-in surgery, (often with many children in tow), clutching a letter stating that they were to be forcibly removed from their accommodation.

All too often the eviction was for that day and not unusually, it was within the hour. I had it all down to a fine art. I’d take their details and phone the relevant housing office, informing the housing officer that I’d be recalling the decree and that they would be receiving notice of service of the court papers imminently. Then I’d dash through to the office, and distribute the essential duties. One of my colleagues would phone the Sheriff Clerk’s Office at Glasgow Sheriff Court and one would phone the Sheriff Officers forewarning them of my arrival. I’d pull on my cleated cycling shoes and hop on my bike, tear down the Broomielaw, along the banks of the Clyde, over the suspension bridge and up to the steps of the Sheriff Court. Surrendering my bike into the care of the police officers charged with performing sentry duty outside, I’d run the gauntlet of inequality. It was called thus, because, once through the doors of the grand entrance of Europe’s largest and busiest court (10,000 cases a month went under the gavel!), you are met with two lines of people. On one side, the wretched and the poor of greater Glasgow awaiting their cases to call, or loved ones to emerge from the many courts in the grand building. Directly opposite them a long line of gowned lawyers giving and taking instructions on their mobile phones. The sight was always slightly surreal.

Running down the line, the cleats of my cycling shoes clacking on the marble floor, I would crash theatrically through the doors of the Sheriff Clerk’s office at the bottom of the grand hallway. The paperwork would be waiting for me to fill out and sign, along with a new court date to be agreed and logged. Then I was off again, skidding along the gauntlet of inequality, out through the revolving doors and onto the bike with a nod to its temporary guardians before peddling back over the suspension bridge into town. Next stop – the well-known firm of Sheriff Officers and Messenger-at-Arms, sited on Royal Exchange Square, a company who made a good living from the medieval structures that still dominated legal life in contemporary Scotland. On many occasions I’d bound up the stairs with seconds to spare and proudly serve the Minute for Recall of the decree for eviction. One of the secretaries (always young, always female) would take the minute through to one of the Sheriff Officers who would phone whoever had been dispatched to oversee the eviction and that, as they say, would be that. The Sheriff Officer present at the property would thus inform the housing officers that the Minute for Recall had duly been served and that the eviction would no longer be taking place. It really was no skin off their nose. They got paid whether the eviction went ahead or not.

As well as preventing homelessness, another of Shelter’s roles is education and awareness raising. The staff at Shelter are required to give talks to a wide range of groups as well as deliver training in the rights of tenants and homeless people and the responsibilities of local authorities and the state. The kind of organisations that benefit from such training are Women’s Aid, Social Work Departments, Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, Immigration and Refugee charities and a wide range of support organisations that provide services to groups that are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. When the UK’s largest stock transfer agreement required Glasgow City Council to hand all of its 88,000 units of accommodation over to the Glasgow Housing Association, the council still had the statutory obligation to provide settled accommodation to those for whom it had an obligation (but no houses to meet their duties). The council had to set up ten separate teams to deal with homeless applications across the city. Shelter were asked to deliver a one-week-long training session to each of the ten newly-formed homelessness case-work teams. The training was comprehensive, and, despite past legal wrangles, was in the main, largely well received.

Not only did Shelter have the expert legal knowledge required to deliver such training, they had a working knowledge and awareness of who knew what and in which areas there were insufficient levels of knowledge. The case-work system that structured their daily contact with clients was the perfect barometer for the gaps in knowledge that would lead to ‘bad’ and in some cases ‘unlawful’ practices.

Reflections 3

At Shelter, two problems existed, one in which the issue was ‘bad’ or ‘unlawful’ practices, the other was down to structural issues caused by policy a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I The World of Housing
• PART II The People of Housing
• PART III The Practice of Housing