Wednesday, 17 August 2011

Evicting Rioters: A Brief Note

As a number of Councils and Housing Associations say that they intend to evict tenants involved in rioting we’ll take a quick look at the relevant grounds of Housing Acts 1985 and 1988 and consider the ramifications. The relevant grounds for an eviction would be Ground 2 of Schedule 2 of Housing Act 1985 (for secure, Council tenants) or Ground 14 Schedule 2 Housing Act 1988 (for assured, housing association tenants). These are pretty much identical, both read:
The tenant or a person residing in or visiting the dwelling-house—
(a) has been guilty of conduct causing or likely to cause a nuisance or annoyance to a person residing, visiting or otherwise engaging in a lawful activity in the locality, or
(b) has been convicted of—
(i) using the dwelling-house or allowing it to be used for immoral or illegal purposes, or
(ii) an indictable offence committed in, or in the locality of, the dwelling-house.
Both are discretionary grounds, which mean that the Court must also be satisfied that it is reasonable in the circumstances to make a possession order and that the court has a further discretion to impose a postponed or suspended possession order with conditions. There can be little doubt that rioting and/or looting would be likely to cause a nuisance or annoyance. There are likely to be large numbers of convictions for indictable offences as well. However, the nuisance or the offence must be in ‘the locality’ of the tenanted property. ‘Locality’ is not defined in either Act or elsewhere. There may well be some difficult cases on what constitutes a locality to come, where the offence/nuisance is not within the immediate neighbourhood of the property. But certainly an offence committed in another borough is highly unlikely to count. Grant Shapps has suggested that the ‘locality’ condition should be scrapped so that those found guilty of ‘being involved in rioting’ in another area could be evicted. The trouble with that is it would simply mean being convicted of an arrestable offence, even if wholly unrelated to the home or to housing, would be a ground for eviction. Read the full article on the nearlylegal website.





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