[Ben Reeve Lewis has three film crews following him around …...]
Monday morning saw me earning my pay by playing Monopoly on the London Eye.
“Is that where my council tax goes?” says you.
All in a good cause, I was filming the end shots for a BBC 1 documentary about Generation Rent airing next month.
I’m out with Panorama on Friday who are concentrating on a different aspect and am enduring months of hell with a Channel 5 documentary crew for a 6 part series going out in September.
It seems, with the national elections looming that the world and his wife is suddenly interested in Rogue Landlords where normally I can’t get anyone to do more than stifle a yawn when I mention their heinous crimes.
Southwark’s Shame
But a different kind of TV prompts my first foray into the news this week. The story of solicitors firm TV Edwards and their involvement in the shaming of London Borough of Southwark over Gate-keeping allegations (honestly, the efforts I go to make creative, flowing links between stories!!!!!!!, yes I know that was a tenuous one).
It’s a homelessness issue but bear with me for a few lines. Gate-keeping is basically any practice whereby a council dodges its duties to homelessness applicants in order to stop them appearing on the homelessness statistics.
In Southwark’s case this involved making applicants prove their own case (the rules say it is for the council to prove or disprove) and only offering temporary accommodation to unemployed people.
Southwark signed a consent order agreeing to stop this practice in order to stay out of the High Court.
This is Huuuuuuuuge news in homelessness land because gate-keeping is very common. However, allow me a rant, then I’ll get back to the funny stuff.
A quick rant
- More people are in the position of having to make homelessness applications than government want the public to think
- If councils return their monthly statistics to the DCLG with a high number of cases on it, the government sends in a hit squad and makes it look like they are being inefficient
- Councils gate-keep to avoid bad publicity and government interference which could impact on budgets
- Result? – government can make it seems as if homelessness isn’t as bad as it really is.
My call to all local authorities is “STOP GATEKEEPING” – not because it is illegal but because it protects politicians from having their incompetence made public.
Pick up every case owed a legal duty which will point the finger at the source of the problem, our elected representatives in Westminster and their collective inability to make intelligent decisions about housing.
They should have gone down the Council …
As you tuck into dinner tonight and look forward to the weekend ahead spare a thought for Tim and Donna Hillyer, dubbed by the Evening standard as “London’s unluckiest family”.
Their home received the unwelcome attention of a Mercedes with a blacked-out driver at the wheel, both of whom arrived unannounced through the wall of their Walthamstow Semi back in November.
Many of their possessions were destroyed but luckily nobody was hurt and the Hillyers were insured, so they moved into rented accommodation nearby while the house was set for repair.
Only to have the cooker blow up and the rental house destroyed by a fire which took their remaining possessions.
One thing doesn’t ring true here though. The family are reported as homeless and a fund has been created to help them out – but with two kids and nowhere to live they would be eligible for homelessness assistance, albeit it temporarily until their house is repaired.
Give Southwark a try
Now that Southwark are in the dog-house over Gate-keeping, maybe the Hillyer’s local authority will contact them and offer assistance. The couple are employed so even if Waltham Forest Council are gate-keeping in a Southwark stylee, they would at least get temporary accommodation.
My advice to them is this, quickly apply as homeless to Southwark who will by now be so terrified of turning anyone away that they will have a uniformed commissionaire on the door saluting and handing out sweets.
Help to buy – not radical after all
Prize of the week for completely shameless electioneering pledges goes to George Osborne who announced to the world an idea to gift £30,000 to social housing tenants to help them buy property elsewhere without using the right to buy.
Before you go thinking “Ooooh George, you old radical”, bear in mind that schemes like this have been around for years in many councils who introduced them to stop the blood draining out of social housing through the scalpel wound to the Carotid artery that is the right to buy.
A famous scheme being the CIS – Cash Incentive Scheme. One wag in the comments below the article refers to this as a “V.I.C scheme”…………..Votes Incentive Scheme. Couldn’t agree more.
Cuts in the Court System
Having been seasoned in the art of sitting it out in the county courts on emergency injunctions waiting hours for a judge to be assigned (tip – take a good book and don’t sit next to your nervous, talkative client) I was intrigued to read no less a luminary than Andrew Arden QC sticking the boot into county court administration.
Cuts in the system are, Andrew says limiting access to justice and worst affecting litigants in person.
“What it means is that no judge is assigned to the case in the hope that one will become free, e.g. because another case settles.
The result is that parties are often left waiting most of the day, a judge may still not become available and the case is adjourned – an enormous waste of money for all concerned and another illustration of putting the burden of state cuts on individuals.“
Mr A also points to the danger of more increased court fees (not just repossession cases) saying:-
“The impact that the increased issue fees will have on litigation remains to be seen but the rise risks making the courts prohibitive to even more people than now”.
If Arden says it, then you better feel it. He’s a tough old bruiser and in no mood for pleasantries.
What made me smile this week
I had to go to North London on Saturday to train Renters Rights London. My nearby station is bad for parking so I drove the car about 3 miles and parked at a more convenient spot, assuring Frazzy I would be home in time for her to drive to a girlie night with her mates.
I came back by train and finally a bus to my door. Had dinner and a chat. Frazzy put her coat on and picked up her keys saying “Where’s the car parked babe?”…………………
Er….later…….in the dog house……..
See ya next week.
If you believe that non-allocation of judges to cases is a problem, it is perhaps not as great as may be in future for litigants in person, by a group who call themselves, ‘The Personal Support Unit’ who offer help in most areas of civil law. A Job Ad for a volunteer in Tyneside is below (they may be a national organisation)
“Litigant Support Volunteer
Personal Support Unit – Newcastle upon Tyne NE1
Our prime purpose is to provide practical and emotional support to litigants in person (i.e. those without legal representation) in the major civil and family court centres in England and Wales. This means volunteers will be dealing with clients who have had problems with debt, housing, divorce and care of children, employment or any other non criminal matters.
“Volunteers will not provide legal advice. Instead they will be putting their time and energy into helping people solve their problems”.
What does putting time and energy into helping people ‘solve their problems’ mean – if a person is already in the midst of perhaps complex legal proceedings?
And for this volunteer position, if a person was a student, they would have to be at post graduate level.
I don’t knock volunteering, but is this the replacement for Legal Aid?
http://www.indeed.co.uk/viewjob?jk=ffe4d59dfc8217bb&l=North+Shields&tk=19evqujno079159u&from=ja&alid=03e9a5e1afaf6a98&utm_source=jobseeker_emails&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=job_alerts
Indeed. The courts in my area (Lambeth, Woolwich, Bromley) at least have a duty desk, staffed by skilled people who do represent LIPs. This really helps in defending possession claims.
The main problems I experience now Colin is with the listings desk. It used to be open 10am to 4pm, now it’s 10 -2pm. They no longer take payments (apart from fees) and all documentation has to be posted through a letterbox on the outside of the building.
If you really do need to see a clerk there is a queue and one window open which can mean a wait of 40 minutes often for a trivial but essential function. I overhear conversations when waiting and it is clear often that they simply allow people to pay for a claim that is clearly pointless, citing the poster on the wall saying “Staff do not give legal advice”….happy to take the money though.
I’ve heard that the plan is to close all court listings offices and transfer to a central call centre like the bulk one in Northampton. That’s going to be fun trying to get through.
Interesting reflections on that gatekeeping Ben. Aren’t LA staff doing this aswell to just get their workloads down?! It was the first thing that came to my mind, when I read it during the week. It must be such a stressful job.
Surprised you didn’t mention the big deceipt that was RTB replacements aswell. Any thoughts?
Court fees are a joke. Especially considering in the last three possession cases I’ve been involved with, most of the claimant’s paperwork that had been properly submitted was missing from the case documents given to the judge.
@Reb Nope, gatekeeping isnt about keeping workloads down it is strictly about statistic massaging and the availability of temporary accommodation.
I’m in a unique position to comment as not only am I based in a homelessness unit and participate in (lawful) homelessness prevention cases but I also train homelessness staff all over the country and hear the same thing pretty much everywhere.
All units have to complete statistic forms called P1E’s which show how many homelessness cases you have and how many people in temp accomm. If the figures are too high the DCLG starts jumping up and down and sending people in.
Never mind things like benefit capping, the introduction of universal credit.Those people will be the homelessness cases brought on by government cuts but will still be unacceptable to the DCLG in terms of statistics. Which is my point. If all 333 local authorities in the land simply picked up all applicants who were actually hold a duty two things would happen, the inner city units would run out of temporary accommodation inside of a week and the blame for it all would fall squarely where it should – the government, and not just this government, there was a homelessness crisis under Labour as well but nobody cares about the riff raff do they?, it sort of ruins their lunch at the River Cafe.
@Jamie Yeah I’m with you on that. Court admin often make major cock ups. Last year I was defending a mortgage repossession. My client said she hadnt attended the possession hearing because she had received no notification of it (the old ‘My dog ate my homework ploy) but the judge adjourned for 10 minutes, checked with the listings office and it turned out that they had not sent the paperwork to poor borrower causing sleepless nights and panic for nothing.
I was a homelessness appeals officer amongst other things. Just before I finished I upheld a review. When the homelessness manager came back after the weekend, she asked me why I had upheld the review. I told her that on the facts the original decision was flawed. She complained and said we could have made the applicant an offer of a welfare priority property. That would mean it would count as a ‘homeless prevention’ case and not as ‘statutory homeless applicant.
Lower homelessness figures, higher homelessness prevention figures even though the person was still awarded a council property.
Colin that story is so typical and a good example that gatekeeping isn’t about giving out council homes but about massaging the statistics.
Several years ago I was for a short time head of homelessness for a local authority. The then ODPM (before it morphed into the DCLG) had a guy who used to come in and create if your homelessness statistics got too high.
We had a pint in a Nottingham hotel bar at a conference where he said to me “You know the name of the game Ben, get your figures down. We dont care how you do it, just don’t get caught”.
This duplicitous attitude is even enshrined in the Homelessness Code of Guidance:-
Paragraph 6.4: Authorities must not avoid their obligations under Part 7 but it is open to them to suggest alternative solutions in cases of potential homelessness where these would be appropriate and acceptable to the
applicant.
If ever a few words contained a nod and a wink then there it is.
Gatekeeping makes me angry because everyone in the industry knows that while government’s public stance is “This is an outrage”, in private they condone it because it means politicians never have to face the mess they’ve created and I include Labour in this. Gatekeeping isn’t a Tory invention.