Legal aid bill defeated in Lords

Tue Mar 6 23:22:45 GMT 2012

Legal aid bill defeated in Lords
Peers vote against a series of government 
proposals, including restrictions on legal 
support for victims of domestic violence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/mar/05/legal-aid-bill-defeated-lords?newsfeed=true
Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 March 2012 19.42 GMT

Squatting law will only criminalise the homeless. Let's demolish clause 130
The million empty homes in Britain are the real 
scandal, not the squatting of a tiny number of occupied properties
Tanya Gold - guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 February 2012 21.00 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/20/squatting-law-criminalise-homeless-clause-130
A young homeless woman in London. Life expectancy 
on the streets is just 43 for women. Photograph: 
Janine Wiedel Photolibrary / Ala/Alamy

A new law is racing through the Lords, having 
passed the Commons. It is called the Legal Aid, 
Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, and 
it contains an infamous clause, which goes by the 
number 130. If clause 130 passes, squatting an 
unoccupied residential property will no longer be 
a civil offence but a criminal one, punishable by 
a maximum fine of £5,000  which feels like a 
joke when tossed at the homeless  or a sentence 
of up to a year. If the government does jail the 
homeless for being homeless, the joke surely is  
well, they won't be homeless any more.

This government's appetite for criminalising 
poverty is unslaked. It is, I suppose, a natural 
psychological response to their policies; once 
you have demonised your problem, you are not 
responsible for solving it. Squatters are by 
definition homeless and, according to the charity 
Crisis, 40% of single homeless people have 
squatted. Research also shows that 41% have 
mental health needs, 34% have been in care, 42% 
are ill or disabled, and 21% self-harm.

So these are the most fragile of citizens, who 
have almost always asked for housing and been 
refused  78% have been turned away by local 
authorities because single people are rarely 
eligible for housing. Criminalisation only 
increases their vulnerability. Rough sleeping and 
prostitution may follow, or something worse. Life 
expectancy is 47 for homeless men, 43 for women.

Some do not last that long. Six years ago I met a 
homeless woman aged 21 under Waterloo Bridge. Her 
name was Kimberly Dowling and a month later she 
was dead and interred in a grave in Kilburn. So 
who can blame the homeless for squatting? You 
might even call it using your initiative to 
improve your situation, a homily Conservatives 
usually purr at, but not this time.

The government likes this law, and is ready to 
lie to persuade the public to accept it, possibly 
because squatting is now associated in the public 
mind with political activism, and imprisoning 
your critics is always tempting. It is, in fact, 
already a criminal offence to squat an occupied 
home, to access utilities without paying or to 
commit criminal damage, under the Criminal Law 
Act of 1977. The tiny number of cases where 
occupied homes are squatted are swiftly and 
cheaply resolved if the law is correctly enforced.

Two high-profile cases last year  Julia High, 
who came home from the Proms to find her house 
squatted by Romanians, and of Oliver and Kaltun 
Cockerell, whose home was squatted before they 
moved in  allowed Conservative MPs to mislead 
the public and conjure nightmarish visions of 
violation of their soft furnishings. The housing 
minister, Grant Shapps, told the BBC that when 
homes are squatted, the "police don't act because 
the law does not support the police acting".

The MP Mike Weatherley told the Daily Mail: "If 
those squatters claim that they did not break 
into your property  though they almost certainly 
will have done  you have no powers to throw them 
out." This is a lie and 160 housing lawyers and 
academics wrote to the Guardian to say so. There 
is a problem with enforcement, but that is the 
fault of the police, not the homeless; the Law 
Society and the Criminal Bar Association oppose 
the new law, and even the Metropolitan police 
thinks the current one is " broadly in the right 
place". Nor is the public agitated by squatting. 
When the Ministry of Justice consulted about 
squatting, 2,126 responses came from "members of 
the public concerned about the impact of 
criminalisation" and only 25 were from "members 
of the public concerned about the harm squatting 
can cause". The people, as ever, are kinder than their government.

The timing could not be more vicious. The chronic 
shortage of social housing, the cuts and the 
economic depression create a perfect storm of a 
housing crisis. Homelessness is up 15% nationally 
in the last year, and rough sleeping in London is 
up 8%. Shapps has promised funding to resolve 
homelessness but this money is a drop in an ocean 
of chaos; it will be wiped out by cuts elsewhere.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer wants to 
exempt abandoned properties from clause 130. 
There are nearly 930,000 empty homes in the UK, 
of which more than 350,000 have been empty for 
over six months. Now that is a scandal that the 
government should ponder; in the meantime, we have the victims to punish.
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