Squatting in the UK

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Knee jerk response that isn't thought through. How is it theft? People don't take the bricks and steal the house! But yes, it's occupation of property, an empty property, usually by people who would otherwise be homeless. Are possession of bricks and mortar that you don't need to live in, by an absentee property owner or commercial landlord/corporation human rights nowadays? Not the last time I checked.

But a right to shelter is a human right.

"The right to housing is recognised in a number of international human rights instruments. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the right to housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living.[1] It states that:

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing

So, given that there is no human right to hold onto property portfolios, and keep properties empty, but there is a human right to housing... I believe there's a moral argument in favour of squatting.

I'm not.

Personally speaking, it horrifies me when I see what some squatters do. But then not all tenants are 'house-trained' either, I've seen some terrible damage caused by people who rent properties, knocking down walls, ripping out features, damaging furniture and fittings, so it shouldn't be assumed that squatters = bad and people who pay to rent property = good. There's good and bad of both.

Likewise, I've sometimes been amazed and heartened by the hard work put in by squatters who repair buildings to make them liveable, patch up holes in roofs, walls and floors, install pipes and plumbing and sinks and showers, people who paint and decorate, people who spend hours and hours and hours working to clear out and clean up previously derelict and squalid buildings, not knowing whether after all the effort they've expended they'll be able to stay for more than a couple of weeks, although sometimes it can turn into months or years.

Personally, I prefer to live with house-trained kind who seek and endeavour to improve properties and repair and maintain them, rather than damage and wreck them.

500 homeless in UK sounds artificially low, I wouldn't trust that figure.

Yes. Criminalising squatting won't actually prevent squatting from happening, because it's not like it's a magic wand you can wave and hey presto you've solved the problem of homelessness, a housing crisis and a lack of affordable housing. Those underlying issues will not be solved by criminalising squatting. All it will do it criminalise many people who previously didn't have a criminal record and perhaps make it harder for many of those people to get stable jobs and stable accommodation in future.

There might be some vagabonds and ne'er-do-wells as you put it, but there are also lots of decent, respectable, otherwise law abiding citizens who squat, you'd be surprised - youth workers, teachers, charity workers, film-makers, lawyers, students, artists and musicians.

The law provides for the property owner to get their property back, except in very, very, very rare cases of adverse possessions, and that's if someone has squatted for more than 10 years: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/pro ... ssion.html

In such cases where someone 'nips out for a pint of milk' or goes on holiday only to find someone in their home, then that's not really squatting, in fact I read about a case recently in a local London paper where a group of people had occupied a property while someone was away on holiday and they had been eating the food and drinking the wine and when challenged said they were squatters. They were done for burglary, and rightly so, and most of them were imprisoned.

In a case like that the Displaced Residential Occupier has the upper hand:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/HomeAndCommunity/WhereYouLive/Derelictbuildingsandsquatters/DG_10022452

So it's a crime to trespass in such circumstances and the law provides for the owner/occupier to regain possession.

Unfortunately, a lot of cops are stupid/badly trained and don't know the laws that they're supposed to be enforcing.

It isn't, however, criminal trespass to occupy an empty property, that's a civil law matter, so in those circumstances the police would (or should, again, they're badly trained and sometimes wilfully misinform people) tell the property owner that it's a civil matter that they should pursue through legal means.

Hmmm... Legal? Well, technically, it's not illegal in the sense that it's not criminal (except when it's not squatting and it is, in fact, criminal trespass), it's unlawful in that it's a civil law wrong, and it's a matter to be pursued through the civil law courts, not criminal law courts.

As for a bunch of hippies taking over some guy's property and he can't get them out - please see my previous comments, but in essence, if he's a Displaced Residential Occupier (or Protected Intending Occuper), then yes he can get them out sharpish. If he's not, if they are squatting an empty building he can still get them out, but it'll take longer and he'll have to pursue a case through the civil courts in order to do so.

For the vast majority of people I know who squat it's a matter of necessity, very few do it when they have other options. And many of them also try to bring attention to empty properties in order to try to make landlords do something constructive with them. For example, earlier this summer I was staying in a shop that had been emtpy for more than seven years and the same landlord had other shops that had been empty for 3-10 years, and flats above the shops that had been empty for 7 years, and in the case of other flats, the utilities company didn't have a record of the property having been occupied for about 20 years! They needed a lot of renovations, but the owner (a charity) was forced to take action, remedial repairs have been carried out and now the flats are occupied by 'property guardians' (anti-squatters, who pay low rents but have very few rights, less rights than tenants). The squats were a success in that they've forced a landlord that was negligently managing properties it owned to bring those properties back into use (ironically, the charity was supposed to be run for the benefit of the poor of the community. but they'd rather leave flats empty than let homeless people squat).

As for your comment about social housing, I think someone else has picked up on that point, suffice to say that there are hundreds of thousands of people on the waiting lists for affordable social housing, and not enough affordable social housing to meet demand.

Yeah, I think it'd particularly suck for a lot of people who are kind of on the fringes of society, like Aspies and spectrum cousins. I've met quite a few people with formal diagnoses of ADHD, bipolar, dyslexic,dyspraxic and so on, and many people who obviously have some kind of diagnosed or undiagnosed, erm, neurodiversity issues. Many such people find it difficult to conform to societies demands to get a 9-5 job and maintain a tenancy or mortgage. Lots of people with mental health issues already face a lot of discrimination in the labour market, find it difficult to find work, and then find it much more difficult to keep a job if they've managed to beat the odds to get one. And the welfare/benefits system isn't set up to help people with 'unseen' disabilities. If you can work,you should. It doesn'tmatter that people might want to work, but employers don't want them!

And over recent decades there's been an increasing casualisation of employment. In previous decades, there was more of a career path, or people started at a factory and worked there for 40 years till they retired. And there was more stability in employment. If you don't have stable employment, it's pretty difficult to maintain a roof over yourhead, because if you're in and out of work, you can't make the rent or mortgage payments and you get evicted. It's a growing problem, and I think it'sparticularly bad for Aspies and spectrum cousins and other people with mental health issues, because in this kind of economic climate it's even harder to find and keep a job, and a roof over your head, and if the other option of squatting is criminalised, well, I guess a lot of Aspies are going to be criminalised and imprisoned and I can imagine that's going to be a proper headfuck for Aspies, many of whom have a heightened sense of right and wrong and 'justice', I mean, how can it be right that a person gets criminalised and imprisoned for being homeless, right? Especially when housing is a human right and it's cost less to pay for someone who's homeless to stay in a budget hotel rather than the tens of thousands it would cost to keep someone in prison (not to mention the knock on effects of a criminal record).

And how do I get online? Yeah, you ca'nt sign up to a 12-24 month broadband contract if you might only live there three months before getting evicted. Well, my laptop charger fried, so I've mostly been offline recently. Otherwise, laptop and broadband mobile dongle. Or if a friendly squat mate lets you use their laptop for a while, some people arekind and generous like that. You can use the internet in the local library for an hour a day for free, which is enough to check emails. Or internet cafes, but you pay for the useage. Or I'd rather pay for a coffee and use free wifi in cafes. Or some people crack wifis if they're gamers or want to download videos and stuff. But I don'tdo that.

What's that quote about statistics and damned lies again?

The government is cutting funding for local governments, (many of which used to operate homeless hostels) and also cutting funding for charities. If you have, say, 1,000 hostel beds in a particular town, 100 beds in each of 10 hostels... and then you cut the funding and as a result five of those hostels close and you now only have 500 hostel beds, have you reduced the number of homeless people?

And the safety net is like a rug that's being pulled out from under the feet of most people. I mentioned that demand for affordable social housing exceeded supply, so the supply is rationed to those who can prove they are in rgreatest need, and especially if you're a single male with no extenuating circumstances, health conditions or other reasons that would mean you're 'vulnerable' and in priority need, you're pretty much expected to fend for yourself and come up with the money for a deposit and rent in advance for a more expensive room or flat in private sector housing.

Hostels are being closed, but that doesn't mean that there are fewer homeless people. It means that there are more people: sofa-surfing with friends/relatives because they don't have anywhere else to live, young people are known as the 'boomerang' generation because after graduation they now return home to their parents house, and after they go and do an unpaid internship or get made redundant or finish a short'term contract, they return home again, there are lots of people squatting.

Hear hear.

A lot of people get worked up about squatters because they read about the very rare cases and it's misreported in the media as 'squatters' when in fact, as in the case I read about recently in a local London paper, they're burglars and treated as such. And also, as I mentioned, the police don't help matters because they often haven't a clue what the actual law is that they're suppowesed to be enforcing, or they try to enforce 'laws' and 'powers' that they think apply/they have, but don't.

The veryvast najority of squatters are occupying property that would otherwise be empty.

Also, some squatters are arguably saving the taxpayer money, because they're housing themselves instead of renting privately and claiming housing benefit for extortionate London rents.

I will be glad when squatting is made illegal. They are not just squatting in 'derelict' buildings any more they are actually stealing people's homes. One couple bought a run down building in London to renovate, went on holiday for a week then came back to find squatters living in there. They had to go through court to get them evicted. how is that fair in any way? As for people with neurological conditions/mental health problems, it's not like there isn't any help for us at all. I live in care because I wouldn't cope out by myself. The only thing that does REALLY bother me is the fact that there is a derelict housing estate (Heygate) in Elephant and Castle with over 4000 properties, most of which are now empty. The council, once the final residents move out (which they don't want to because they paid for the flats), plan to knock all 4000 down and put about 2000 (roughly) back up. Most of these will be quarter of a million pounds. So while I don't support squatting, I also think the councils/government need to get the housing priorities right. They keep building these really posh, expensive houses when people really need 1-3 bedroom properties.

I'm with Tequila, piroflip, Jellybean and others who are similarly minded on this.

Just because a property is empty it doesn't give a person the moral right to move in and occupy it, no more than it gives them the right to take a car that is on the street.

A barrister friend and I were talking about this on Christmas Eve. He pointed out that since the coalition government had cut funding to the courts, it can take longer for cases of squatting to wend their way through the legal system and it can now take up to six months for owners to re-take possession of their property.

And empathy has nothing to do with it. In this case, you are confusing empathy and sympathy. If anyone is lacking empathy, it is the squatters.

You'd be right not to. According to the most recent figures from the National Statistics Office there are 12,510 known homeless in the UK (ie those who have contacted the authorities for help and not including those unknowns who haven't) plus there are 49,100 families who are officially homeless but currently housed in temporary accommodation.

In my opinion squatting should not be made illegal while there is a housing crisis. The greater 'crime' is having habitable property sitting empty while there are families in desperate need of somewhere to live. And contrary to popular belief, moving into someone else's home while they are temporarily away (eg on holiday) is not squatting and is unlawful.

The squatters I have known have always taken care of property that was otherwise unused, unloved and allowed to decay because investers were waiting for planning for development. They turned it into homes for human beings.

where abouts are you in the uk?, why aren't you on the council housing list?

And I know from first hand experience that some people fall through the gaps in the safety net and cannot get help and support in finding a legal place to stay. And also there are some people who, even if an organisation did help them find somewhere legal to stay, then they wouldn't necessarily be able to maintain a tenancy - I'm aware of quite a number of people who have simply givenup trying to battle 'the system' to obtain the help and resources that *should* be made available to them, but aren't, people who simply opt out of claiming benefits because of executive dysfunction, or whose claims are disallowed or suspended for petty reasons, and then because the benefits system is so stressful and counterproductive to a person's mental health and wellbeing so they'd rather try tobemore 'self-sufficient' rather than battle a broken and failing system.

If people struggle to get the property back, that would be very unusual. It can often take a local authority a while to get property back, because they have large legal departments, but often their lawyers aren't so good, and they make mistakes with the paper work, so that can 'buy more time' for the squatters.

And before anyone jumps in and argues about squatters 'stealing' properties from people on the council housing waiting list - in many cases squatters occupy flats in buildings that are scheduled for demolition,but which still have some remaining legitimate tenants who are waiting to be rehoused. In such circumstances, isn't it a crime that those flats are left empty while people are homeless? It can take a couple of years to rehouse all the tenants in a block of flats, and it used to be quite common for local councils to allow a 'short life' housing co-op to take over the empty flats until all the council tenants had moved out and the block was going to be demolished. And that makes sense. But now it's increasingly common for councils to send in their workmen to rip out kitchens and bathrooms to make those flats uninhabitable. Which doesn't make sense.