[Ben Reeve Lewis is leaning new tricks…]
One of the best things about a new job is learning new stuff.
I’ve been prosecuting landlords for harassment and illegal eviction for years now so it’s all a bit familiar and “yeah, yeah”, but my new role as PRS Enforcement Coordinator is teaching this old dog new tricks.
The RIPA nightmare
Heard of RIPA? The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
When it was introduced it was known as a ‘Snoopers Charter’, ushering in more powers in the wake of increasing terrorist threats to allow public bodies to carry out surveillance and obtain information from other organisations without the subject knowing about it.
Maybe it works well for spooks, those secretive MI5 types who the eponymous TV programme would have us believe all look like super-models instead of John Le Carre’ shabby old dossers, but for people in my position, TRO’s, EHO’s, housing benefit fraud investigators RIPA is a major pain in the arse.
We have multi agency meetings with a named landlord/letting agent on the agenda, we all have different parts of the jigsaw and a range of investigatory documents but we have to work out which of us is allowed to see which bits of what the other one has.
For instance if DWP fraud find something out about the person that was prompted by information they originally got from the council that they shouldn’t have been party too, then their prosecution could fail.
Far from being a snoopers charter it seems, from the perspective of my flowering relationship with the legislation, to be a criminals charter, allowing them to walk on a technicality if we all get one tiny bit of the investigation process wrong. You don’t even have to lie or fit someone up, just showing yours to someone who should have seen it is enough.
Where’s Gene Hunt and Jack Regan when you need them?
Drawing evidence
Talking of dodgy procedures I was curious to read this piece in the Daily Mirror about a child’s school drawing of neighbours from hell that was used as evidence in the eviction hearing.
Fair enough the family do sound like complete nutters; loud parties each night, urinating in neighbours gardens, jumping on cars and they quite rightly deserved to be evicted but I can’t see any judge that I have ever been in front of allowing a kids picture as evidence.
I know that the standard of proof in the civil court is just ‘balance of probabilities’ but even the most kindly judges I know wouldn’t let that one through……would they????
Certainly wouldn’t get through the RIPA test anyway.
Data Protection answers
Talking of going all Secret Squirrel, the Guild of Residential Landlords this week pointed me to an interesting article on website of the Information Commissioners Office about the vexed question of whether or not the Data Protection Act allows agents to share referenced information about tenants with their landlords [we have written about it here too Ben, eg here – Ed].
This is a question I have been asked several times. The ICO tells it very straight and unambiguously:-
“The agent can pass this information to the landlord, as long as, when the reference is asked for, they make clear to the tenant and the referee that this will happen”.
There! That should settle things once and for all.
A few other common questions are answered there too.
- Can a landlord pass the names of new tenants to the utility companies? Yes.
- Can landlords put up a list of tenants who are in arrears? No.
- Can a landlord pass forwarding addresses of former tenants to the utility companies? Yes.
There, nice simple laws, just the way we like them, not this bloody RIPA nonsense.
The Audit Commission is pleased (sort of)
And staying with fraud and investigations I was heartened to read that the Audit Commission found that councils are making headway against social housing fraud as reported on Housing Excellence.
In 2012 councils repossessed 2,642 homes that were being illegally sub-let, which would have cost £400 million if they had to rebuild (Yes I don’t get the point of that weird statistic either). This all represents a 51% increase in fraud detection on the previous year.
For once the Audit Commission cheered on the councils saying:
“There is no doubt our findings show councils increasingly out-smarting the housing tenancy fraudsters. This shows what councils can achieve by working effectively together in partnership, sharing and adopting best practice,”
Which is exactly my point and the purpose behind my new role.
Fraudsters of all stripes have been getting away with murder for too long because council’s are so mired in restrictive laws (like bloody RIPA) and too denuded of staff to keep on top of the amount of scams and general criminal activity being reported.
But if you take all those small teams dotted around the council, those shabby John le Carre types squirreled away in a forgotten back room somewhere and put them all together in a room to form one big enforcement team then you stand a good chance of spoiling someone’s day.
However the Audit Commission wasn’t all smiles, it isn’t their default mode, and revealed that most of the fraud is detected by a small number of top performing councils. But they did add:
“We encourage all councils to play their part and do as much as they can to detect fraud. If the other 75% of councils had found as much, we would see much higher overall rates of fraud detection,”.
Yep! It aint Kansas anymore, Dorothy and council’s have to become less like Margaret Rutherford in Miss Marple and more like Sean Connery in ‘The Untouchables’.
Door talking
Throwing this week’s fraud and spying theme completely out of the window my final eye is drawn to a curious piece on Planet Property “What does your front door say about you?”
At first I thought this was an article about paranoia, the notion that one too many spliffs can cause the illusion that the portal to your home is spreading tittle-tattle about you with the hedge, but no.
In the style of a cheap astrologer the authors at PP suggest, with tongue firmly in cheek that:
- UPV = Modern Mamma
- Glass Panels = Sophisticated sister
- Wooden Door = Conservative Chick
- Painted Doors = Boisterous Babe
- White door = House Proud Homebird
The whole thing turns out to be a promotion piece for Todd doors who obviously paid PP to push people their way.
Curious though that all the names are aimed at women. Maybe that’s what the research tells us, that the women choose the doors as an outward expression and the blokes buy and fit them.
Doors as status symbols? All a bit depressing I think. I prefer to think that my door does talk about me when I’m out and that when I come home it says to the hall “Oh god here we go again”
See ya next week.