On my travels around the UK as a housing law trainer, often delivering courses for homelessness workers I am struck by a weird attitude to the work of preventing homelessness.
The common assumption among many workers is that prevention lies in finding alternative accommodation for the homeless applicant and nothing more.
This often becomes a sticky route to the infamous ‘Gatekeeping’ but it doesn’t have to be so.
The missing ingredient
What is often missing is knowledge of ancillary legislation outside of conventional homelessness rules requiring the homelessness prevention officer to delve into the world of landlord tenant law, and the regulations on repossession.
Hostels are often hideous things, and B&B even worse, surely a homeless applicant is better off staying in their own home for as long as possible? Provided that the conditions are sound and they aren’t at risk of violence.
To my mind, after a lifetime spent in this field saving a person’s home is by far the better route, not only legally and financially but morally as well.
Saving homes is best
As a TRO of 25 years standing I always got a terrific buzz out of saving people’s homes, not foolishly. If the property is unaffordable then it’s pointless fighting to keep people there but often, more subtle interventions can resolve matters for everyone.
This has become a bit of a cause celeb for me. Something which nags like a hole in a tooth when I know how much can be done to resolve matters for all parties, tenant, landlord, borrower and lender.
The FREE report
So I have created a free report and 6 weekly emails on different approaches to homelessness prevention which hopefully will flesh out the topic and encourage homelessness workers and even those who advise against them, to take a sideways look at the subject.
What is often required, as well as a knowledge upgrade, is a confidence boost for the officer or adviser to realise that courts do make wrong decisions and that mortgage companies and their high-powered, posh lawyers are often actually trying it on and you CAN challenge them, if you know what to ask for and how to ask for it.
So sign up….its free and you can’t argue with free, even if you decide not to use the material.
Tessa,
I see it asks for username and password on the form.
Do we have to register on your site first?
Only, I don’t see any Register link for that.
Thanks.
You need to register on the EasyLawTraining.org website which is one of the websites we have for the Easy Law Training business. (Confusingly the information page is on the .com website but the signup page is on the .org site).
You need to register so we can send notifications when the next weeks training becomes available.
However it is easy to unsubscribe from the mailings if you do not want anything else after the free report.
Note that the EasyLawTraining.com site also hosts the free landlord 12 part series which you can sign up for here http://easylawtraining.org/sfl-free-e-course-2/ and then access via the same login.
There is also a 12 part tenant series but that is on the http://tenant-law.co.uk/ website.
I’m on EasyLawTraining.org but I see no sign-up option – apart from that given to get emails (i.e just asking for email). The form to get Ben’s Homelessness stuff asks for a username *and password* Tessa.
If this is a quiz, I’m afraid I’m not going to pass.
11 people have signed up so far so it does work.
Here are specific instructions for those who are having difficulties:
1. Go here http://www.easylawtraining.com/free-homelessness-prevention-toolkit/ this is the information page (on the .com website) where you can read more about what you are getting
2. Click the big orange button on that page which says ‘Get Access Now’ This will take you here http://easylawtraining.org/checkout/?product_id=2038 (where you sign up to get the information – its on the .org site)
3. Complete the form. You probably won’t already have a login for that site so you will need to put in a username and password for yourself as well as your name and email (you will then use the username and password when you come back to view the course info). There are some instructions on the right. Ignore references to payment as this is a free service. The same page is (at the moment) used for paid and free services.
4. Once you have inputted your information and clicked the green button you will be taken to the download page.
And thats it. You will also get a series of emails about the free information, but you can cancel this whenever you want.