Conflicts in responsibilities
Working in housing enforcement can put the officer dealing with poor property conditions at odds with a homelessness unit who might be responsible for rehousing the families displaced by enforcement action.
For this reason, there is often a certain tension between these two distinct arms of council responsibilities.
This is not helped by the different regulations that environmental health and homelessness teams work under when it comes to whether or not it is reasonable to expect a person to remain in the accommodation.
Add to that the tenant’s own views on what is and is not reasonable and you can see that in many situations everyone is at odds with everyone else.
Conflicts in regulations
Before the Housing Act 2004 ushered in the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, that tension was already there. Whilst environmental Health could declare a property unfit for human habitation in their terms, a homelessness unit was not bound by that legal machinery and could still deem a property ‘Reasonable to occupy’.
By way of examples
Take the case of R v. South Herefordshire DC ex p Miles (1983) where the Miles family occupied a wooden hut measuring 20 feet by 10 feet, with their two children and one on the way.
The hut was rat infested and not connected to the mains but they had access to facilities by using a nearby caravan belonging to a relative.
A situation that I would imagine have had the EHOs of the time tutt-tutting – but the court agreed with the council that they were right, in homelessness legislation terms, to deem it reasonable to occupy, although they did point out that once the third child was born it would no longer be the case.
Similarly, in R v. Gravesham BC ex p Winchester (1986), where the council decided the Winchester’s were intentionally homeless for giving up accommodation that had appalling disrepair, damp, dangerous external stairs and a balcony that was hanging off. A situation that caused the court to find that the council had not unreasonably or perversely arrived at their decision.
Homelessness unit has more to consider
One of the main legal problems in these Mexican stand-offs between environmental protection legislation and homelessness Regs comes from the fact that whilst acknowledging that a property may be overcrowded or suffer from poor conditions, the homelessness unit can have regard to the other poor buggers in the same boat.
“In determining whether it would be, or would have been, reasonable for a person to continue to occupy accommodation, regard may be had to the general circumstances prevailing in relation to housing in the district of the local housing authority to whom he has applied for accommodation or for assistance in obtaining accommodation.” S177 (2) Housing Act 1996.
Meaning very bluntly, that if you are living in a slum but the rest of the houses in the street are also slums then, then it can still be reasonable to remain in homelessness terms.
There are obviously numerous cases which drill further down into these issues in more detail but you get the general idea.
If an EHO serves an HHSRS notice for Category one hazards on a landlord, which are essentially dangers to life and limb, then the homelessness unit are somewhat behind the eight ball in looking at reasonableness – but it still doesn’t automatically mean that the person is homeless as a result of the service of the notice.
What would be considered unreasonable to occupy in the long term might not be in the short term.
Different scenarios mean different outcomes
If a property is very poor but the landlord has been served with works notices then a homelessness unit could take the view that the problem was being resolved without the need for rehousing.
Prohibition orders are the big problem
If an EHO shuts a property down then the homelessness unit has to step in, so the preference is often for serving a suspended prohibition order, which means that the household doesn’t have to move out but once they have gone, the landlord is prohibited from letting it out again until the identified problems have been rectified.
It becomes a softer option because of the blow-back onto the homelessness unit if they close a property down straight away.
This is not an ideal situation and I often wonder, when attending these things, whether the EHO is suspending an order where they might not have, if it weren’t for the fact that their attempts to make people safe isn’t going to cause a problem further down the line.
Don’t get me wrong, I entirely understand the position of the homelessness unit, dealing with thousands of applications a year with little to nowhere to place the families they have to accept.
They have enough important work on without their enforcement colleagues creating a different housing crisis through the enforcement itself.
Article 31 closure
Several years back I was caught up in a difficult case where the London Fire Brigade had closed a disused pub down that was occupied by around 28 families, using what they term an “Article 31 closure”.
Trouble is, they didn’t tell the homelessness unit, who by lunchtime had no room in reception to even seat the amount of families who fetched up with all their possessions in bin liners, let alone the normal footfall.
Whilst I had no problems whatsoever with the concerns of the fire brigade, their closure order wasn’t without its ramifications for council and resident alike.
So to sum up
This article is really just a focus on one tiny aspect of the housing crisis in the UK, where the work of Environmental Health Officers, in trying to improve property conditions in the PRS can create problems elsewhere in the system.
What my outfit, Safer Renting are finding, is that the better our local authority enforcement partners get at tracking down, rogue landlords and dangerous, unlicensed properties, the more it drives up harassment and illegal eviction, where a criminal landlord moves to get rid of witnesses and evidence that we need for our work.
If we aren’t successful in doing our job, then many of the poor unfortunates we try to protect end up in the homelessness unit.
Where landlords complain that licensing makes the decent ones pay for the bad ones, the reactions of criminal landlords to attention being paid to their properties, often pushes the problem over to the homelessness unit, for which all citizens pay, not just landlords, not to mention the people caught up in the morass of competing legislation and the rapaciousness of an individual or company whose only interest is income without regulation.
I don’t understand the final paragraph. Certainly licensing schemes favour those landlords willing to ignore the law. Certainly everyone pays for the homelessness unit. But I can’t see a connection between the two. Licensing schemes can’t legally be used to pay for the homelessness unit. Nor can they be used to pay for more enforcement and thus make people homeless.
Peter you have completely lost me at your second sentence, “Certainly licensing schemes favour those landlords willing to ignore the law”. I am at a loss as to what to say to that interpretation.
The entire purpose of licensing is to improve property standards and punish those who try to evade the regulations.
My point in this piece is to explain that when criminal landlords try to evade detection and subsequent prosecution, their response is usually to illegally evict any people that might provide witness statements to people like me.
These criminals use aliases, fake companies and non existent addresses to escape detection and the evicted people often end up in the homelessness unit because enforcement types cant find the perpetrators.
If licensing is the problem then the only logical solution is to abandon licensing, in which case we might all just give up and let them get on with it.
That will at least stop complainants being illegally evicted and ease the pressure on the homelessness unit.
A result of sorts.
My understanding of “Certainly licensing schemes favour those landlords willing to ignore the law” is that the cost of licensing paid by good landlords is passed on to their tenants. This raises rents. Bad landlords not paying for licenses also raise their rents, giving them bigger profits.
(I’m mainly discussing HMOs below as that is the thing I know most about).
Do the licensing schemes ever increase the required property standards? The only things I have seen about property condition are requiring landlords to comply with existing legislation. Licensing schemes appear to be to pay for the enforcement costs of HHSRS etc. During Oxford City Council’s first additional licensing scheme (2010-2016), they did nothing to find rogue landlords themselves but relied on the public to report them. This was the case before the ALS was introduced. Two years ago, I was told that they had not dealt with any problems that were not covered by HHSRS.
As I see it, the licensing schemes are to make landlords pay for the policing of standards. But good landlords won’t do this – they will pass the cost on to tenants or get out of the market, driving rents up. If society thinks that tenants should pay for the enforcement of housing standards all well and good, but personally, I think that it should be paid for by society (although I don’t complain too loudly as the ALS has nearly tripled rents in 8 years).
I disagree with your statement that housing would have to be unpoliced if there are no licensing schemes. The HHSRS and all the regulations dealing with HMOs are still there to prosecute bad landlords. You would still have the same problems with the bad landlords and their evasion tactics but it isn’t the good landlords’ tenants paying.
I get the point of your article except for the last paragraph, which brings licensing into something it seems to have little directly to do with.
Your comment about abandoning licensing ending illegal evictions caused by criminal landlords being detected seems to make no sense unless councils are using licensing to pay for other parts of housing enforcement, but that is not allowed. Chasing criminal landlords is something councils are supposed to do even without a licensing scheme.
Certainly licensing can be used to improve standards or get landlords to help police tenants behaviou, but I can’t see how it helps tackle criminal landlords. It certainly makes life easier for criminal landlords by reducing the competition from law abiding ones by making it less profitable to operate legally.
“If licensing is the problem then the only logical solution is to abandon licensing, in which case we might all just give up and let them get on with it.”
What utter nonsense.
Even if the licencing scams worked, it would still only be just one tool of many.
I’m sorry Adam but I wrote this piece to let people know about the little known legal problem of definitions of reasonable to remain.
It was not my intention to enter into another tedious debate on the unpopularity of licensing, which is the fate of the majority of my articles.
And yet Lockdown remains a completely unaddressed blight on the London market and a fraud on the taxpayer. Nothing has been done. http://www.hanworth.org/2018/10/19/lockdown-remains-an-unaddressed-blight-on-the-london-housing-market/
Jonathon as one of the people who started the London Lockdown project and who has been inside about 50 of them in different London boroughs since 2015 when they really started to come to the attention of various enforcement officers I think I have a handle on why.
-They are loved by charities and some homelessness units because they provide homes for single homeless people.
-Planning officers dont all agree about PD or the breaches.
-The people who pay HB just arent interested.
-The size of the problem means there isnt a council in the land with enough officers to deal with them
-In the current climate there is a big corporate reluctance to target this specific community, so even where officers are keen to move they have no backing to do so..
What I think will be an interesting development is the new minimum room sizes from 1st October, as many of the ones I have been inside would most likely now fail the test, given the en-suite bathrooms but first environmental health are going to have to get their heads around the question of whether or not these things are officially HMOs and that can change by the day, using the cooker in room/shared kitchen trick
Sorry to be dim but what is ‘Lockdown’ in this context? Or should this be a separate post?
Sadly the minimum room sizes are a complete red herring as is the change from two to three storeys. The median ‘flat’ size of the c.2,500 Lockdown flats I have identified is 13sq m. And you must surely know as well as I do that after taking advantage of PD a great many properties had already been expanded to 3 storeys and remained unlicensed and unenforced against. So we can totally dispense with the notion that ANYTHING has changed.
Whilst I can do nothing but agree with your assessment of the confusion and difficulty involved it does not let authorities off the hook for their inaction – most particularly given the level of real harm to all parties save the money-grubbing landlords. It’s incredible to me how many people will leap to the defence of a landlord overcharging LHA but decry a single mother who overclaims by a penny!
This organised cartel – yes, highly organised with provable connections to one another’s businesses, revolving directorships and shared trusteeships to charities with loans and donations flowing back and forth – are siphoning many millions of taxpayers’ pounds into their pockets where the money goes dark.
That LAs, the DWP, the VOA, Companies House, HMRC and other authors do not care or refuse to investigate does not mean the perpetrators should get a free pass.
Early on I fought back against the VOA’s automatic re-banding of these properties and discovered that they rely on the advice of LAs to do so. Where it has been achieved by a landlord it involves a publicly available form. I requested under FOI such forms as were lodged for various Lockdown properties and after a brief fight I was officially informed that the re-banding had not occurred by this route. By default this means that LAs were informing the VOA and that their word was being taken as gospel. And which department of an LA fulfills this function? The Council Tax revenue officers. And what do we know about the windfall availble to LAs from the creation of ‘new homes’ which these are absolutely classsified as? It brings large amounts of desperately needed funds into LAs. Moreover. They get the increase in the revenue from 5 or 6 properties at c£900 per annum from each if the subdivided ‘flats’ rather than the 1.2 grand from the modest 2-3 bed small home. And even better for the landlord, they pass the cost on to the tenant even though the hierarchy of payments require the landlord of an HMO to pay the CT themselves on the entire property! Remember, these cannot be self-contained flats as they woukd require planning permission which they do not have….
So my sumpathy for LAs is vanishigly small. They are totally complicit.
And as for the Lockdown Project, well… I reached out to them and soon realised they were far more interested in keeping the entirety of the problem a secret from the public – failing to even publish their feeble report! They claimed that prosecutions were ongoing and woukd be jeopardised. Well that line if defence has yet again recently be shown to be a total pack of lies.
You and I have done far more to bring attention to this than the very folk who allegedly received hundreds of thousands of pounds of government money to do so.
Jon I feel like I’ve been banging my head against a brick wall on this for the past few years. Despite three TV programmes I’ve been involved with trying to highlight it the wind just hasnt fanned the flames of public outrage as it should.
Early on in the game I convened and hosted an event at City Hall for other London boroughs, accompanied by the LFB over fire safety concerns. I outlined the business model but didnt mention any company names. Everyone knew the model and then we discussed names and found the different ones used in different boroughs and yet still 3 years later…………….
That you think council tax themselves may sit right in the blame frame there seems the obvious conclusion but I’m still unclear how that might happen in practice. The accommodation that gets banded is unknown to the council enforcement teams, which is my point and problem. I doubt council tax teams would know about them either, so what is your understanding of the process? Is it merely a constant green light to band anything?
Council revenue departments are totzlly siloed from Planning. Nor do they understand certain basic norms like the hierarchy of payments. Even where i have forced Lockdown properties into belated licensing (a completely worthless endeavour it turns out) tenants are still being stiffed for CT which it is not their obligation to pay and they cannot of course afford! In many cases they ate not even being provided with the basic waste disposal facilities that CT is supposed to provide! Try explaining the riddle of HMO licensing by an LA and yet the refusal by revenue to recognise the hierarchy of payments…. they don’t listen and bang on with the same bullshit. It’s essier to chase the tenant than the landlord.
It’s relevant Tessa. Different disciplines cant agree in legal terms on what they are and whether it is reasonable to occupy them, and given that enforcement could make the occupiers homeless, as I commented in the article. Tom Wall explains the problem quite well in this Guardian Piece.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/jan/13/landlords-housing-benefit
Maybe, but what actually is ‘lockdown’? I don’t know what the word means in this context.
Lockdowns is the term the press have taken to using to describe the practice of purchasing normal 3 bed family homes and converting them into 5 or 6 micro flats. When I worked at Lewisham we were one of the first groups to fall across them and once we found them we kept finding new ones virtually everyday. In the first 3 months we found around 40.
Each house has a communal kitchen but also small portable cookers in the rooms, which are also en-suite. The game that is played is the developers claim the “micro Flats” (and trust me…..they really are Micro) are what is termed “Permitted development”. Planning officers often take the view that they are illegal conversions but all they have to do to satisfy planning is to take the cookers out and tell the occupiers to use the communal kitchen but then that becomes a housing benefit issue, because if its a shared house then the occupiers should only be on half HB at the shared rate. All occupiers are either over 35 or single mums, so entitled to full rate HB.
I did a programme for BBC1 late last year in which you can see a communal kitchen and a sign on the wall saying “No cooking in rooms” (at precisely 6 minutes 21 sec in) and yet they are still getting full HB despite this clear evidence of a shared house and this is the case in every one I have been in to . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnqVjWfp67Y
Roz and I contacted people we knew across London in the same jobs who were also finding them and we formed a loose information sharing group called the London Lockdown Project (Roz’s choice of name) to lock the growing problem down.
Lockdown then went beyond a small group of enforcement types sitting a room chatting and is now a funded initiative. I’m not a member at the moment as I’m mainly working on other problems but we still find them.
Thanks. Sorry to ask, but if I don’t know what it means, I’m sure other people won’t either!
Thats fine, I thought it was becoming more commonly known about.
One thing that nobody mentions, which could stop it dead in it’s tracks is for the VOA to refuse to band the micro flats for council tax if the developers dont have planning permission first.
The VOA will band a bird house if called upon to do so and its a right old hassle, giving a certain legitimacy to what are often illegal conversions and outbuildings.
The VOA could well be the secret weapon for not only Lockdown but other madness as well. If a property has been newly converted you know about when you walk in, you can spot them and yet so many conversions arent picked up by planning enforcement because a) they are behind closed doors and no immediately apparent and b) there arent enough officers to deal and if they dont get picked up within 4 years they cant order them to be reconverted.
I didn’t know it was called ‘London Lockdown’ either.
It is not solely a London-centric problem though, it goes on in midland and northern towns. The same business model but with lower LHA, which is compensated by lower property purchase prices. Usually with the same target customer, single, male, over 35, drug problems.
“The people who pay HB just aren’t interested.”
I can’t think of any other effective way to stop it.
A ten minute most basic of basic check before handing out thousands of pounds of taxpayers money.
(I can already hear the ‘lack of resources’ council howls at the suggestion.)
For those who care to understand the history and detail of the Lockdown Landlord model of exploitation I would direct you to my November 2017 submission to the then DCLG Select Committee. You can read it here: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/housing-communities-and-local-government-committee/private-rented-sector/written/74162.html
It is downloadable as .pdf here: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/housing-communities-and-local-government-committee/private-rented-sector/written/74162.pdf