Red Pepper » Housing

Tenant troubles

admin — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:00:58 +0000

In July last year, radical housing group Housing Solidarity took up the case of three private tenants in east London who found themselves stuck at the centre of a dispute between the landlord of their new flat and the letting agent, Victorstone Property Consultants. The landlord had changed the locks, leaving the would-be tenants without their new home or the £3,451 they’d paid for rent and deposit. While they managed to recover some of the money from the landlord, Victorstone had held on to around £1,200 that it refused to repay. The money was only returned after Housing Solidarity organised scores of people to call, email and fax Victorstone. Within two hours the company had caved in.
This is just one example of new groups using direct action casework, an organising model that had its roots in the unemployed workers movement of the Great Depression, when people organised to demand their basic needs were met by relief offices. Today, the model has been adopted by the London Coalition Against Poverty, whose members Hackney Housing Group and Haringey Solidarity Group’s housing action group have both won victories in cases where families were at risk of homelessness due to eviction by private landlords.
With sky-rocketing rents for what is often poor quality and insecure accommodation, and those on low incomes being hit by no fewer than seven different cuts to housing support, it’s no surprise private tenants are starting to fight back. But historically, private tenants have been notoriously badly organised, lacking the community links and a common and publicly-recognisable landlord.
And the problems of private tenant organising cannot be underestimated. Many private tenants don’t even know who their own landlord is, let alone whether there are any other tenants and if so where and who. Insecurity of tenure exacerbates the problem, as private landlords can easily evict ‘troublesome’ tenants.
Although there have long been a handful of private tenants organisations, the rise in activism has been driven mainly by newer grassroots groups with a younger demographic and new ways of organising, communicating and taking action. Instead of replicating the committee meetings, annual reports, and formal structures of traditional tenants groups, these new groups generally work with more open structures and have much greater propensity to use social media and direct action tactics, often based on individual struggles.
In May, concerned about the impact of housing benefit cuts on private tenants in the borough, the Haringey group organised a public event to bring people together. One of the outcomes was a specific focus on the problems faced by private tenants, inspiring actions such as a ‘community housing inspection’ of local letting agents, which exposed discrimination against housing benefit claimants, inflated fees, insecure tenancies and extortionate rents.
2012 also saw the establishment of the vibrant Edinburgh Private Tenants Action Group. This has already seen success after its targeting of letting agents over tenants’ fees led the Scottish government to clarify that all such fees are illegal in Scotland. Again tailoring action to tackle problems faced by their members, in July the group converged at the offices of DJ Alexander, some of them in TV cop costumes inspired by the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’ video, and designated it a crime scene due to the illegal fees the agency was charging.
Similar creative tactics were adopted by the Hackney private renters’ group Digs and other housing campaigners, who held an action in December to coincide with the national day of action called by UK Uncut. More than 50 people shut down a branch of Starbucks for an hour to hold a ‘housewarming party’ highlighting the cuts’ impact on access to decent housing.
To date, most of the new groups have worked within existing structures, albeit in novel and often powerful ways, to deliver results. But there are clearly limits to this approach, and demands for reform, including rent controls, increased rights for tenants, such as greater security of tenure, and more stringent requirements of landlords, are already being made.
But for many campaigners there is also recognition that the problems faced by private tenants cannot be tackled in isolation. The private rented sector is an expensive way to house people and delivers the worst outcomes in terms of decency and security, with the exception of temporary accommodation.
So different groups are increasingly working together to call for more and better access to other housing tenures, particularly more social housing. They are situating calls for reform within a wider critique of the current housing system, and rejecting the market as a just or effective means of distributing access to this fundamental human right.
Illustration by Martin Rowson

Lambeth’s short-life sell off

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:23:44 +0000

Lambeth Council is at an advanced stage of flogging off the last of its ‘short life’ properties to private property developers. Evictions of the people in them were already due to have started as Red Pepper went to press and those emptied are being sold at auction.
At one time the council had about 1,200 of these properties, houses in such bad state of repair that they were given to people on the housing list at no or low rents to do up themselves. Today they have about 170 left. Some residents have been in these short life houses for 30 or 40 years and are now in their sixties and seventies.
Many are run by housing co-operatives, a number of which have now grouped together in a ‘super-co-op’ to campaign against the sell off and propose an alternative co-operative solution (see www.lambethunitedhousingco-op.org.uk). But this is no block to the council selling off these houses off on the private market and destroying the co-ops, and with them well-established communities. The residents have often spent thousands of pounds putting in new windows, central heating and on general repairs. The housing was given to them precisely because at the time the councils wouldn’t spend that money.
In July 2011 a small group of cabinet members decided to push ahead and terminate all short life properties, revoking the licences and putting them on the market. Since then there have been a series of court cases with the council trying to evict or harass people to leave. Private Eye reckons that at least £175,000 has been spent paying the legal firm Devonshire’s bills so far.
Lambeth Council rejected offers from social landlords to take over these properties. A local co-op, Ekarro, offered to pay 25-27 per cent of value to keep them in social ownership – it was refused. For a long time Lambeth claimed it was negotiating a deal with Notting Hill Housing Association and needed the tenants to leave to achieve it. It soon became clear this housing association turned property developer was going to sell off 80 per cent of the properties on the private market, keeping only one fifth for social housing. This deal fell through as well. So with its eyes on £32 million worth of property Lambeth turned to the private market itself, entering a hugely expensive process and paying off a series of corporate vultures.
Money no object
When a property is vacated the council pays to make it uninhabitable to ‘stop squatting’. Later, it pays the multinational Camelot to go in and make it habitable again for its ‘guardians’, people often in desperate housing need who live in the property. The council then pays a fee of anything up to £100 a week for Camelot ‘protecting’ the property. The guardians, who have no tenancy rights, live in the property paying Camelot a deposit of £500-600 and a ‘rent’ of up to £65 a week. Little wonder this Netherlands-based multinational had a turnover of £20 million in 2011.
The council then has to pay auction houses such as Andrews and Robertson fees to sell properties at an average of 30-40 per cent below market prices. A recent 10-bedroom house in The Chase in Clapham, cleared of short life tenants, was sold for £1.6 million. At the same time a much smaller house in the same street was being marketed for £2.6 million.
How much will be left of the £32 million after the lawyers, multi-nationals and auction houses take their cut is anyone’s guess. What is certain is that very little will go into providing new social housing because Lambeth Council does not build any. It has said: ‘We are selling off properties that are uneconomic to refurbish and part of the money generated will go into the Single Capital Programme of which part will be used to allocated housing.’ (Our emphasis.)
Lambeth Council argues that all evicted short life tenants will be offered priority in council housing. But this misses the point – the members of these co-ops do not want to move and see their communities destroyed. Neither do they want to take someone else’s place on the council waiting lists. Lambeth already has 25,000 on its waiting list and only 25,000 council properties; by selling its housing it is just contributing to London’s housing crisis.
Not going quietly
The co-op members are not going quietly. They are fighting the council in the courts, where in a series of shambolic appearances by council lawyers, things have moved very slowly. The co-ops have the support of local MP Kate Hoey, who even forced an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on the issue last December.
A protest at Rectory Gardens, where some of the properties are located, at the beginning of November halted a planned viewing organised by auctioneers. But with evictions now starting, protests must be stepped up locally.
For more information go to www.lambethsaveourservices.org

Dale Farm: The human cost of prejudice

Michael — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 11:20:44 +0000

Photo: Mary Turner
The storming of Dale Farm by hundreds of riot police at dawn on 19 October 2011 was the money shot that the press had been waiting for following weeks of legal proceedings; the next day they all went home. But three months down the line, the eviction continues for the Dale Farm community, unreported. Their former home has been systematically destroyed by Constant & Co. bailiffs, who have transformed this once vibrant and close-knit community into a sewage-filled bombsite. With nowhere else to go, the vast majority of the displaced Travellers now live on the private road (owned by them) leading to Dale Farm and on their friends’ plots on the neighbouring Oak Lane site. Living in overcrowded conditions, they lack adequate access to water and toilet facilities, the only electricity supply is through noisy and expensive generators, and many of the young children and elderly people are ill. It is an unreported refugee camp, just thirty minutes away from London.

Arriving at the site last week, we were greeted by an elderly man who looked up at the remnants of the children’s rope swings hanging from the trees and said ‘What is there to live for? What hope do we have? My wife and I have talked seriously about ending it all. This is no way to live.’ While the trauma of the eviction is still vivid for the residents, it is what happens next that worries them most of all. Kathleen, an articulate five-year-old with an acute awareness of the challenges facing her community, explained the situation to me: ‘Basildon Council and the police came and they broke everything. They broke the walls, and my granny’s caravan, and they broke all the ground, and even my mum’s back [Kathleen’s mother was hospitalised with a fractured spine during the policing operation]. We were crying and we were so scared. Now, Basildon Council want to move us again, but they can’t put us out on the road because where can we go?’

It is this last question that remains unanswered for the Dale Farm residents. Contrary to reports that the Dale Farm Travellers owned property in Ireland, the 83 families who lived at Dale Farm are now homeless. Long before the eviction, the Travellers said they would willingly leave Dale Farm if culturally appropriate alternative housing was provided, but Basildon Council have refused to acknowledge any duty to provide solutions for the community they evicted from their homes. Instead, they are pouring their resources into preparing a new set of enforcement notices, expected to be issued in the next few weeks, which will force the community out of Dale Farm and into car parks and lay bys. The children, who are the first literate generation of Dale Farm Travellers and have continued to attend school throughout the upheaval, will be uprooted from both their education and their community. Conditions at Dale Farm are dismal, but life on the road will involve endless evictions. As Mary Flynn put it, ‘No one would ever stay here if they had a choice, some place else to go. But if they evict us again, we’ll be on the road to nowhere’.

The situation at Dale Farm is not just a product of local tensions, but is symptomatic of the wider problems facing the travelling community. There is a shocking deficit of Traveller sites in the UK: 20% of the caravan-dwelling Gypsy and Irish Traveller community do not have a legal or secure place to live. In the mid-1990s, Travellers were encouraged by central government to buy their own land and settle.[1] However, planning permission is rarely granted to Traveller communities; according to the Commission for Racial Equality, more than 90% of Travellers planning applications are initially rejected, compared to 20% on average.[2] The double standards of planning applications can be witnessed in Basildon, where the Council have recently authorised a dogs’ home on the same ‘protected’ greenbelt on which Dale Farm is located.[3] In this context, Council leader Tony Ball’s maxim that ‘the [planning] law must be upheld’ begins to appear rather hollow. Indeed, while the government have recently injected some much needed cash into the provision of Traveller sites, they have simultaneously removed the duty of local councils to provide sites, increased powers to evict ‘illegal’ encampments and undermined the ability of travelling communities to challenge eviction.[4] The Dale Farm Travellers, like many others belonging to this marginalised community, are stuck between a rock and a hard place as their traditional way of life is criminalised; they cannot travel, they cannot buy their own land and settle, and local councils like Basildon are offering them no alternatives. As Basildon Council issues statistics claiming that, at a cost of over £7 million, the eviction of this community came cheap, urgent questions need to be asked about the immense human cost of institutionalised prejudice.

The Traveller Solidarity Network is organising a national speaker tour about Dale Farm throughout the month of March. Find out when it is coming to your town here: http://travellersolidarity.org/traveller-solidarity-tour/

[1] Department for Communities and Local Government, Gypsies and Travellers: Facts and Figures (Department for Communities and Local Government, March 2004).

[2] Sarah Cemlyn et al, Inequalities experienced by Gypsy and Traveller communities: A review (Equality and Human Rights Commission 2009), p. 8

[3] Basildon Borough Council, PLANNING APPLICATION NO. 11/00433/FULL (Basildon Borough Council, December 2011): http://www.basildonmeetings.info/ieDecisionDetails.aspx?AIId=26527.

[4] Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, Submission to Communities and Local Government Select Committee inquiry into the abolition of regional spatial strategies, (Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, September 2010). Lord Avebury, Legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill (Hansard, 24 January 2012), c. 928-941.

‘The government may have trampled over democracy but people will still be squatting’

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 20:15:48 +0000

A last-minute change to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill in November criminalised squatting in residential buildings. The government announced the additional clause just six days before the vote, making serious campaigning against criminalisation impossible. But the government’s haste may yet prove its downfall. Parliament has produced an unclear piece of law that may not stand up to legal scrutiny.
Paul Reynolds, a SQUASH (Squatters Action for Secure Homes) activist, describes the legislation as ‘the criminalisation of the homeless in a housing crisis’. There are currently 700,000 empty properties in the UK, and 600,000 people facing homelessness, which increased by 17 per cent last year. According to Crisis, 40 per cent of homeless people have slept in disused buildings to avoid sleeping rough. The new legislation will criminalise people who are already vulnerable.
SQUASH was resurrected in May this year, having started when previous attempts to criminalise squatting were tabled in the 1990s. The campaign involves a broad coalition of groups, including Crisis, the Empty Homes Agency, lawyers, activists and squatters themselves. It focused its efforts on getting people to take part in the government’s consultation. Their success was phenomenal: 96 per cent of respondents expressed concern about criminalisation, including the police, magistrates and even one landlords’ association. Just 25 members of the public responded to say they were concerned about squatting, compared with 2,126 who expressed concern about the harm caused by criminalisation.
The Ministry of Justice declared that although ‘the statistical weight of responses was against taking action on squatting’, it had taken a ‘qualitative rather than a quantitative’ approach as so many responses (90 per cent) were received in support of SQUASH’s campaign. Yet even if these are discounted, five out of six individual respondents were still against criminalisation. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ commented SQUASH campaigner Joseph Blake. ‘They’re completely ignoring the results of their own consultation.’
Headlines in some newspapers have suggested that squatters pose a significant threat to home owners. Yet it is almost unheard of for an occupied house to be squatted, and existing legislation already enables ‘displaced residential occupiers’ or ‘intended occupiers’ to immediately evict squatters with police help.
What the new law does is call legitimate protest tactics into question. The ambiguous definition of the term ‘occupier’ could criminalise many forms of dissent. If the tweets of housing minister Grant Shapps are anything to go by, this is exactly what the new legislation will be used for. On the day of the vote he tweeted this threat: ‘St Paul’s: Right to protest NOT a right to squat. Looking at law to see if change needed to deal w/ camps like St Paul’s & Dale Farm faster.’
There are plenty of reasons why the government might have thought it useful to rush through this legislation, and criminalising the current wave of civil and student occupations seems a likely one.
SQUASH activists have already seen their right to protest denied. On the night before the vote an organised ‘mass sleep out’ in Parliament Square, to highlight the number of people who may be forced onto the streets, resulted in 17 arrests. The police claimed the protest was unauthorised because SQUASH hadn’t given seven days’ notice: an impossibility as there were only six days between the clause being announced and voted through.
An emergency amendment was written by Crisis and tabled by John McDonnell MP. This proposed that criminalisation should not apply to residential buildings left empty for over six months, and that the particularly vulnerable – such as care leavers and those registered as homeless or at risk – should be exempt. The amendment failed and with Labour abstaining, the bill was easily passed.
The rush to legislate leaves various issues unanswered and potential loopholes for the future. It criminalises squatting only in residential rather than commercial properties and it is unclear what this distinction actually means. Does it, for example, include any building with residential planning permission? It will be up to the Lords to make sense of this confusion before it passes into law, and SQUASH will be lobbying peers to rip up the legislation and start again.
SQUASH’s Paul Reynolds is convinced that the legislation will prove legally unsound when scrutinised in detail. And whatever the outcome, he says, it won’t end squatting. ‘The government may have trampled over democracy but people will still be squatting,’ he comments. ‘They’ll just be more organised now.’
www.squashcampaign.org

Housing: The market has failed

Michael — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:45:20 +0000

Photo: chrisjl/Flickr

Published with a fanfare last week the Coalition’s housing strategy has been rather overshadowed by Osbourne’s austerity statement on Tuesday. But you can see the similarity immediately. The foreword by Cameron and Clegg does not refer to the housing crisis. It says the aim of the strategy is “to help drive local economies” and “create jobs” and to “provide a much needed boost to employment” i.e. it is about stimulating private investment and economic growth and secondly to “boost opportunity in our society”. It is not about solving or addressing the housing crisis; the focus is to get the house builders building again.

Subsidising the house builder

To achieve this, the priority is to “unblock the housing market”, that is to say, attract private investment from mortgage firms to banks back into property. With the usual Coalition speak, the strategy puts a fair amount of the blame for market failure on the previous government for being top down. There is not a word of the market itself – the house builders and their land banks (containing up to 600, 000 units potentially) or the reckless sale of sub-prime mortgages that have left 800,000 in negative equity; nor of the landowners asking outrageous prices for land; or landlords charging tenants exorbitant rents; nor of the banks that will not lend to small house builders – let alone any reference to the property lobby that has written the Government’s new rules on planning and housing finance.

To kick start house building investment the Government is to offer significant direct and indirect subsidies and support to the house building industry. Direct subsidies include Build Now Pay Later on public land; and a Get Britain Building Fund for small builders. Indirect support includes an Infrastructure Fund, indemnities to mortgage lenders; planning deregulation; and reducing developer obligations for section 106 and zero carbon measures.

Brazenly, the strategy announces that the chairman of Berkeley Group plc, a company that specialises in market homes, has been appointed to provide advice on to maximise development opportunities on publicly owned land.

Housing need ignored
The subsidy to investors is hidden behind a headline claim that more mortgages will become available by reducing deposits from 25% to 5% for first time buyers, and getting more investment into private rented housing by providing incentives for developers to enter that market. But will these measures mean that more people will get help with housing, or that housing need or homelessness will be addressed?

Yes for some – but for most people wanting to buy, prices and rents remain prohibitively high, and are likely to increase due to spiralling unmet demand. Even if you are eligible for a smaller deposit through the new indemnity scheme, there is no guarantee of low mortgage interest from banks and building societies. With economic confidence at an all time low, this is not a great time to take the risk of a mortgage of any kind. And the small print is that the indemnities are for new build purchases not for the majority of transactions which are not new build properties. This shows the extent to which the strategy is focused on house builder profit lines and not on meeting housing need.

Increasing housing inequality
Billions of wealth is locked up in land and property by companies, rich landowners and pension funds, and there is no shortage of land for development, but to get this wealth invested in affordable housing is the problem. The Government strategy has failed to do this. It has tinkered, but not dealt with the key blockages of land held off the market, nor the scandal of the house builders build and sell model, leaving local authorities and communities to pick up the bill for community infrastructure and management. The deregulation of planning and warnings to local councils that should not make schemes “unviable” by making demands on developers will lower the bar on the quality of development even further.

The only answer to this is land value taxation and use of Compulsory Purchase, plus direct public investment in council housing and massive support for mutuals and cooperatives. Strategic responses such as new towns/eco-towns and overspill towns have been forgotten. None of this level of thinking is on offer, indeed it is studiously avoided. In the case of council housing, the Government intends to sell off more by offering larger discounts.

There is strong promotion of neighbourhood planning and community led design but no grasp of the cost to communities of doing this. It reads like a fantasy from Witney and Chipping Norton where there is lots of local cash with villages awash with retired executives. This does not begin to rise to the challenge of meeting housing need in urban areas (where 80% of the population live), and where land is in short supply and usually costs a fortune to buy and bring back into use.

The strategy is billed as “ambitious” but in fact is cautious and conservative. It describes itself as “working with the grain” of the market and that about sums it up. It is the market that has failed – working with the grain just takes us further away from meeting housing need.

Revenge of the repossessed

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:13:00 +0000

This April marked four years since the collapse of New Century Financial, a top US sub-prime mortgage lender, which arguably lit the fuse of the global financial crisis. The scale of home loss in the US continues to shock. More than five million homes have been repossessed since 2006 and distressed mortgages account for a third of the entire US housing market. New tent cities have sprung up to house the millions who have lost their homes, while millions of homes lie empty.
Although Britain has so far avoided the extremities of the US, Spain and Ireland, all the elements of a perfect storm are gathering in the wider housing system. Large numbers of households can simply no longer afford their mortgage. In 2004, there were 8,200 repossessions in the UK; in 2009, that figure had jumped to 48,000. Last year it was 36,300 and similar numbers are predicted for the coming years due to low growth, mass unemployment and public sector cuts.
The implications are serious for an economy so indelibly tied to the fortunes of the housing market. Repossessions further depress house prices, in turn reducing household wealth, increasing crime, hitting consumer spending, making it more difficult for people to move home because of falling equity and worsening credit ratings for large numbers of people, which will increase their cost of borrowing in future years. And none of this compares to the destructive effects of home loss to people and community.
Falling house prices should have helped those first-time buyers previously locked out by the bubble. Yet despite a 25 per cent average fall in house prices since 2008, unaffordability remains endemic. Shelter recently calculated for England that a household would need a £60,000 deposit and an annual salary of at least £55,900 to afford the average house price of £226,648. But most first-time buyers cannot even muster the £25,000 deposit typically needed to get a mortgage at affordable rates in the new era of risk-free lending. There is also a wider threat to the banking system – should repossessions keep rising and first-time buyers fail to get on the housing ladder, then banks will be left holding hundreds of thousands of devaluing properties, threatening their balance sheets and liquidity.
But the contradictions go much deeper. As more and more households join the queue for a home of their own – the numbers on local authority housing waiting lists have nearly doubled since 1997 to around five million – the combination of a dysfunctional housing market and a precarious economic outlook is wreaking havoc on new supply.
Since 2006-07, house building completions have slumped dramatically to their lowest levels for nearly 90 years. Increasing numbers of would-be owners are thus remaining in the private rental sector. This is causing demand to outstrip supply in many parts of the country, not least London where over the past year rents have soared by 7.3 per cent and will soon hit £1,000 per month on average.
Around 10 per cent of all rent is unpaid or late. Companies specialising in helping landlords to evict tenants say that evictions relating to rent arrears rose by 12 per cent in 2010 compared with 2009.
Rising food and energy bills, falling incomes, increased economic insecurity and the associated reduced access to credit mean for growing numbers of people a weekly battle to keep a roof over their heads. Shelter believes that more than two million people used their credit card to pay their mortgage or rent during 2010, an increase of almost half on the previous year. No wonder homelessness and rough sleeping are on the rise again.
The coalition’s housing nightmare
If things are bad now, the coalition government is about to make them a whole lot worse. Top of the bill are the draconian cuts and changes to housing benefit (see Red Pepper, Feb/Mar 2011). Private tenants will be hardest hit, especially households in inner London and other high-cost rental areas who will be displaced to the urban periphery in their tens of thousands because they won’t be able to afford the rent.
Grant Shapps, the millionaire Conservative housing minister, summed up the coalition’s revanchist attitude to the urban poor to the Guardian back in October 2010: ‘Just because you are on housing benefit, that shouldn’t give you the ability to live somewhere, where if you are working and not on benefit you can’t. We’d all love to live in different areas, but I can’t afford to live on x street in y location. The housing benefit system has almost created an expectation that you could almost live anywhere, and that’s what has to stop.’
The government’s Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme, which enabled homeowners facing a loss of income to reduce their monthly mortgage payment for up to two years, was closed down in April. Inside Housing recently revealed that homeless ex-offenders in Nottinghamshire are being issued with tents and sleeping bags by the probation service because of government cuts.
More fundamentally, the coalition is declaring war on the most affordable and secure housing we have in the social rented sector. The small but symbolic return of new council housing in the dying days of the Labour government has been killed off, along with the previous model of government grant funding to support housing associations’ commercial borrowing to build social housing.
Enter stage right the coalition’s so-called ‘affordable rent’ scheme under which housing associations that want to build new housing will compete for a far smaller pot of subsidy and be allowed to (read: must) charge 80 per cent of local market rents. The government is also empowering all social landlords (including councils) to offer flexible two year tenancies to all new tenants. We are witnessing the death of social housing as we knew it. On top of this, the government is preparing to make squatting a criminal offence in England as in Scotland.
Origins of the crisis
We should be under no illusions about the coalition’s purpose – it is the return of what Ralph Miliband called ‘class war Conservatism’, this time with a Liberal face. But to understand fully what is going on here requires an historical perspective, which tells us three things vital to a politics of resistance.
First, the UK housing crisis did not originate in the boardroom of Lehman Brothers. It is, as Engels explained 140 years ago, an endemic feature of capitalism everywhere that it continually condemns significant numbers of people to housing misery, and periodically blows up into a wider crisis.
It was the catastrophic failure of private landlordism during the 19th and early 20th centuries that gradually impelled state intervention in the form of public housing. During the post-war era, a mixed economy of public and private house building helped to constrain the boom-bust cycle and replace the dominance of the private landlord with a mix of home ownership and council housing. The long-term withdrawal of local authorities from housebuilding has coincided with a highly volatile period of housing market instability, with no fewer than four boom-bust cycles since the early 1970s.
Second, the roots of the present housing crisis can be traced to the over-accumulation crisis of capital of the 1970s, which arguably gave birth to the evil twins of financialisation and neoliberalism. Expanding home ownership was vital for finding new sources of accumulation for finance capital. This is why neoliberalism made the privatisation of public housing in Britain its flagship policy, shutting down affordable and secure alternatives to the market and co-opting key sections of the working class into what Thatcher called ‘popular capitalism’.
All our eggs were placed in the home ownership basket, and it was the potent combination of extravagant lending, speculation and the financial commodification of housing that drove the market higher and higher. Mortgage securitisation – selling on mortgage debts of varying degrees of risk as investment bonds and using the capital to start the process again – generated the so-called ‘cheap and easy credit’ necessary to enable the poorer and more precarious sections of the working class to buy: the so-called ‘sub-prime market’. As the bubble grew, and competition between lenders intensified, those at the front-end of sub-prime lending responded with ever-riskier lending that was only sustainable if house prices continued to rise and interest rates remained low forever. They didn’t.
Third, New Labour fundamentally embraced the privatisation agenda and oversaw a disastrous decade of pro-market housing policies that only fuelled the problem. Now in opposition under Ed Miliband, the Labour Party is undergoing a housing policy ‘review’, but it is unlikely to move substantially away from its longstanding belief in home ownership and housing market wealth, nor its misguided faith in a market-dominated approach to providing affordable housing.
Building a movement
We urgently need to resist the coalition’s current housing onslaught, yet resistance has so far been slow to take off. A new housing coalition has been launched called Housing Emergency, which involves Defend Council Housing with a number of trade union and housing groups, including the Christian body Housing Justice, and the more community-based direct action of London Coalition Against Poverty (see www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk). It aims to bring grass-roots pressure to bear on MPs and councillors in opposing a raft of government measures.
Naturally, Housing Emergency faces real obstacles to mobilising outright mass resistance, such as the weakness of the tenants’ movement, the lack of support from official tenants’ bodies and housing charities and the government’s clever stigmatisation of housing benefit claimants and social housing tenants. On the tactical front, pressurising MPs and councillors is going to achieve very little unless targeted directly at bringing down the coalition, and much of the legislation is already through.
But what the campaign really lacks is a genuine cross-tenure approach that mobilises around every aspect of housing precarity – and that includes homeowners in mortgage arrears or being repossessed. Individual home ownership (and mortgage-bondage) might form an essential pillar supporting capitalism, but when a household is repossessed for failing to meet mortgage payments or is compulsory purchased by the state to make way for a new housing or commercial development, we should fight to defend the homeowner. Commodification and displacement, not tenure, should be our enemy.
Perhaps the anti-cuts movement’s lack of inspiring alternatives to decommodify the provision of a decent, secure, affordable home partly explains why some housing activists appear more inclined to take advantage of the ‘big society’ agenda than resist it. The opportunities for genuine community ownership and control being floated as part of the localism bill might be limited, but they are attractive to people looking to generate more co-operative housing schemes.
Co-ops have long been advocated by some socialists and anarchists as a superior housing alternative to the market than what the writer Colin Ward called the ‘municipal serfdom’ of state housing. In the past decade, the potential of community land trusts (CLTs) to create affordable, secure housing has become increasingly attractive. Popularised in the USA and gaining ground in rural Britain, a CLT is a community-controlled organisation that owns the freehold of land and thus controls land use in perpetuity. By taking land out of the private property market, CLTs stop speculative and inflationary forces driving up property prices and rents for the existing community. At the same time any increase in value (or equity growth) stays with the local community and does not becomes private profit. Communities can therefore, in theory at least, build their own permanently affordable housing geared to individual income levels and available across all tenures.
While we should embrace, not fear, the creation of non‑hierarchical, directly democratic, and collective forms of housing, I seriously doubt whether CLTs can create real housing alternatives to the market on the scale and timeframe required. Given their desire for community control, the length of time it takes to get a CLT off the ground and the need for private borrowing to build, they appear best suited to very small residential developments favouring those on above-average incomes.
Proponents of CLTs openly acknowledge that their favoured approach depends almost entirely on the discounted sale or gifting of public assets while private property itself remains untouched. The fear is that proponents of CLTs and co-ops will side with the privatising state when it attacks council housing in order to unlock housing land for community ownership. Public housing might be an imperfect and corrupted commons, but it has protected people against private landlordism, and guaranteed tenants much lower rents and much higher housing rights and protections than the private market. There is no guarantee that CLTs will do this.
Resisting commodification
We thus need to find a way of building a housing movement that simultaneously resists the commodification of housing and its consequences, and creates alternative forms of decommodified housing without undermining what we have already got. Following the proposals of Peter Marcuse for the US context, at one level this would be a movement demanding radical reforms that would seek to ameliorate the effects of the housing crisis and tackle its root causes.
These would include: a moratorium on all evictions, repossessions, compulsory purchases, privatisations, demolitions, and benefit cuts; the right of home owners to sell their homes at a fair value to the local authority in return for security of tenure as tenants in their existing homes; full funding for the existing public housing stock to be refurbished and maintained at a decent standard; and stronger rent controls in all sectors to bring down the cost of housing and undermine speculation. A land value tax might also be useful here.
Because such measures will be resisted by capital and neoliberal politicians, the political strength of this housing movement will depend on two core attributes. First, its ability to bring together public tenants, homeowners, private renters and the homeless around a shared agenda to build at every scale a broad-based campaign for affordable, secure, dweller-controlled housing regardless of tenure. And second, the creation of non-market alternatives – whether using the existing legal apparatus or through extra-legal activities – in the here and now that provide people with degrees of security from eviction or repossession.
No single tenure or housing model should be given preference but a key principle must be that no initiative should undermine any existing provision of affordable housing or the ability of people to stay in their homes and neighbourhoods. Empty or misused private land and property could be occupied to provide free squatted housing that would be defended from repossession attempts.
Existing homeowners, meanwhile, looking for more collective ways of living together, could sell their homes to a new housing cooperative, swapping their existing mortgages for rents that build up an equity stake in the now collectively-owned asset. Significantly, these homes could no longer be bought and sold in an anonymous competitive market place, creating a collective shield against the speculative and competitive forces driving up the high and inflating prices in the private housing market. If such a model could be generalised to the point that it had critical mass in any defined geographical neighbourhood, it could play a huge role in regulating the private housing market, and in turn, the enormous cost of housing.
These actions to decommodify and socialise public and private housing cannot by themselves mean the end of capitalism and thus the end of the housing question. But the process of tenants mobilising for community control is an essential part of building an anti-capitalist movement, creating social relationships, providing examples of what a society based on use-value could be like and helping to create the social and moral basis for a movement to bring that society into existence.

Housing cuts: Resistance begins at home

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 13:40:00 +0000

From this April, the government will cut housing benefit, allow social landlords to charge 80 per cent of market rents and permit limited-term social tenancies in place of lifelong security of tenure. In the long term, the coalition aims to drastically reduce social housing and to cut homelessness assistance, leaving the precarious and expensive private sector as the only option for most households. And in the short term, the public sector stands to save very little, as the £2 billion the government will save on the existing housing benefit bill risks being spent on emergency bed and breakfast accommodation for newly homeless families.
The housing cuts come to a sector that has already suffered from underinvestment. It has led to poor-quality and overcrowded housing, long waiting lists, harsh ‘gate-keeping’ practices at homeless persons’ units, and a £20 billion housing benefit bill, which has increased by 50 per cent over the past ten years as a result of the housing shortage and rising rents.
The Department for Work and Pensions calculates that 936,960 households will lose an average £12 a week in housing benefit under the new regime, meaning that many people will be forced to cut back on basic necessities. In London itself, 82,000 families are vulnerable to losing their homes in what is effectively a bid to cleanse inner London boroughs of poorer households, placing a greater strain on homelessness provision in outer London. Even those in outer London boroughs could face a choice between cutting back on weekly expenditure or leaving their home, job, school, family, and support networks.
Members of the self-help Hackney Housing Group recognise that the fight needs to be for more social and affordable housing, not just against housing benefit cuts. Homelessness is not just caused by the cuts but by a lack of housing. Members of the group have been meeting regularly for the past two years and have supported each other to win housing from the council through a range of tactics, including marching down to the housing office and refusing to leave until demands are met.
One Hackney Housing Group member, Janinha, found herself locked out of her temporary accommodation and the locks changed while she was looking after a relative in hospital. She by-passed the council’s official complaints procedure and, accompanied by a large group of supporters, took a letter down to the town hall. In response, she was told she had no grounds for complaint – but in the same envelope found an acceptance letter for social housing. By having the support of a group of people, rather than facing the council as an individual, she had managed to win her case.
Many of the people in Hackney Housing Group have taken direct action to resolve difficult housing or benefit problems. They have gone on to support other people, learning from their own struggles and continuing as part of the group. Through mutual support and wider campaigns, they have gained a political awareness that comes from understanding that ordinary people have the power to make changes. Moving from personal victories, group members have turned to wider campaigns for more social housing and rent controls and, of course, against the housing benefit cuts.
Being part of a sustainable support group is very important to members of the group. Morta was made homeless with a five‑day-old baby and failed to win her case because she did not have a ‘right to reside’ in the borough. She took advice from the group and managed to get permanently housed by gaining a right to reside through a part-time job and eventually winning a legal case. ‘When I first came to the group I didn’t take it very seriously,’ she says. ‘Now I think it is really important to support each other.’ One year later, she is an active member of both the Hackney Housing Group and London Coalition Against Poverty.
Its experiences over the past few years means that Hackney Housing Group is well placed to know what people need and how to fight against the current cuts. As group member Ellie Sching puts it, ‘If we can’t stop the cuts then we need to stop the evictions. To get people involved we need to be campaigning to change our own situations, to defend our homes and to win housing for ourselves.’ The group believes that any campaign must involve the people who are facing the housing benefit cuts and that the anti-cuts movement should not simply be about protests and lobbies but should help people change their own lives. In the case of housing, people need support to keep their homes, as well as participating in a bigger campaign.
The group is currently establishing an emergency phone tree with other existing groups and activist networks in Hackney to provide an emergency number for people worried about losing their home. Members hope that the phone tree will provide a way for people to stop evictions, through advice, information about group meetings and call-outs to stand in the way of evictions.
The group’s approach combines mutual support and direct action with a local publicity campaign and is linked up with other groups that are more experienced at lobbying. Together with Defend Council Housing, the group are lobbying Hackney council to agree ‘to campaign against cuts in housing benefit and refuse to implement cuts in housing benefit where this is under local control and to promise not to evict tenants who get behind with their rent as a result of the new cuts in housing benefit.’ Defend Council Housing has already got Barking, Dagenham and Islington councils to sign up to this demand.
The lesson from past campaigns, such as that against the poll tax, is clear. The anti-poll tax movement gathered momentum on a ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’ basis, and included actions such as trying to keep non-payment court cases going as long as possible. Widespread involvement with the campaign only occurred because of the use of direct action by ordinary people to meet people’s immediate, practical needs. It was this that finally won the battle.
Today, we need to recognise that the anti-cuts movement will remain limited to people with experience of political involvement if it does not attempt to help people address their immediate needs. While important, marches and rallies will neither build the movement far beyond ‘the usual suspects’ nor win the campaign against the cuts. As groups such as Hackney Housing Group have shown, by winning individual victories, people’s personal struggles become a collective fight.

For more advice on starting an emergency housing group or running a sustainable group, taking direct action and campaigning locally against the housing cuts, get in touch with London Coalition Against Poverty (londoncoalitionagainstpoverty@gmail.com). Other groups that will offer useful advice include Defend Council Housing (info@defendcouncilhousing.org.uk), Advisory Service for Squatters for advice on how to stop evictions (advice@squatter.org.uk) and UK Uncut for wider direct action (www.ukuncut.org.uk)

Saving council housing

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:15:39 +0000

When New Labour came to power in 1997, it seemed that Tony Blair’s government might be responsible for killing off council housing for good. The new government had decided not only to stick to the Tory policy of ‘transferring’ (privatising) council houses, but to massively speed up the process. It planned a target of 250,000 transfers a year – a rate of privatisation that would have eliminated all of the UK’s three-million council homes in just over a decade. The spin doctors were whispering darkly about ‘the end of council housing’.

If their plan had worked, council housing would be dead and buried by now. Yet after more than a decade of New Labour, there are still 2.5 million council homes in Britain – a reduction, yes, but nothing like a wipe-out. The pace of privatisation has slowed back down to a crawl.

And not only that, but Gordon Brown has pledged to lift the borrowing restrictions that currently stop councils building homes, telling councillors he would ‘sweep away anything that stands in their way’. The government is now under major pressure to fund a new council house building programme as part of its anti-crisis ‘economic stimulus package’ – something it would once have found unthinkable.

How on earth did that happen? The answer lies in examining the strategy and tactics of a campaign called Defend Council Housing.

A democratic opening

Defend Council Housing was founded in 1998, but the fight against council housing privatisation started a decade earlier, when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives first tried to bring in ‘stock transfer’ in 1988. As soon as Thatcher floated the idea, tenants fought for and won the right to hold democratic ballots on the transfers, using the Tories’ own idea of ‘tenants’ choice’ against them. Tenants won the ballots in Torbay, Rochford, Salisbury, Arun and more, and the government started to retreat.

‘It was this struggle that ensured the right to ballot on transfers,’ writes John Grayson, author of Opening the Window: the hidden history of tenants’ organisations. ‘Defend Council Housing and thousands of council tenants have only had the right to mobilise around ballots because tenant organisations won that right in 1988.’ The same is true of security of tenure, and in fact of council housing itself, which was won by a movement from below. ‘Your rights didn’t fall from the sky,’ Grayson tells tenants.

So ten years on, when New Labour started to encourage councils to speed up the rate of transfer, council tenants across the country were able to demand ballots, citing the clear precedent.

Small groups of tenants seized this democratic space, forced the councils to run proper elections, campaigned, and won thumping No votes in many key areas – even though they were fighting against councils’ big-budget pro-privatisation propaganda. They were able to tap into the clear public feeling in support of council housing that the mainstream politicians had ignored, and give a voice to the majority who oppose privatisation.

‘Anyone except the Nazis’

News of early victories in places like Cheltenham and Sandwell spread, and in July 1998 the local groups came together to create the national Defend Council Housing campaign. This new coalition built on and revitalised the existing tenants’ associations, seeing the tenants’ movement start to grow again for the first time in decades.

The tenants built the broadest possible coalition, drawing in trade unions, councillors and MPs. It set itself up to fight on every front: not just winning support from tenants but linking up with council workers; not just protesting but also lobbying elected representatives; not just railing against New Labour but trying to win support for motions among its conference delegates.
Such diversity of tactics means that DCH is a campaign with something to say other than ‘things are terrible, come to the next protest’. It always makes sure to provide a list of ways that new people can get involved in every area of its activity. It publishes a newspaper and pamphlets centrally, as well as supporting local campaigns to help them produce and distribute posters, leaflets and ‘Vote No’ publicity for ballots.

Defend Council Housing takes pride in working ‘with anyone except the Nazis’. So any BNP members sniffing around are told where to go, but everyone else – Labour, Green, Liberal, independent, whatever – is welcome. The campaign uses this broad base to focus on the ‘pressure points’, wherever they appear.

In and against

DCH made a big step forward when it managed get a motion supporting council housing at the Labour party conference in 2004 passed by an almost unanimous vote (it has pulled off this feat again every year since). Daniel Zeichner, who sits on Labour’s housing working group, told Inside Housing magazine that it was clear why the government had changed tack: ‘Pressure from within the party.’

The issue of winning support from council workers is also vital. ‘The unions are behind us all the way,’ says one Defend Council Housing activist. ‘It gives us more strength to fight when we know that council staff are against transfer too – especially when they tell us that our campaigning is rattling their bosses.’ The campaign has won unanimous backing at TUC congress and support from a long list of trade union conferences.

In parliament, more than 250 MPs have signed one of the campaign’s early day motions. DCH also has very good links with the council housing group of MPs, which has just launched a new inquiry to build more support in the Commons. Rather than just denouncing ‘the government’ or ‘the council’, the campaign makes real efforts to win as many MPs and councillors as it can over to its side.

Lobbying alone would be unlikely to win much. But as well as gradually forcing the government’s hand, such work also gives confidence to activists on the ground to go out and win ballots, knowing that DCH is a serious campaign with support from every quarter, not some last-ditch rearguard action. ‘If tenants think you are just protesting you won’t be taken seriously,’ its latest pamphlet tells new activists. ‘Make it clear you are serious about winning.’

The fourth option

The strength of Defend Council Housing is that it did not just go all-out to stop privatisation, throwing everything it had into a purely ‘anti’ campaign. Having made broad alliances, DCH then put forward a carefully considered, reasonable and workable policy alternative to privatisation – what it calls the ‘fourth option’ (in contrast to the government’s three proposed alternatives, all of which involve some degree of privatisation).

Brushing aside the stigmas and myths about council housing and focusing on the facts, not rhetoric or polemic, the fourth option puts the case for direct public investment in ‘a new generation of first-class council housing, with lower rents, secure tenancies and a landlord tenants can hold to account’. It is a case that is not only useful as a set of arguments for activists, but detailed enough to be taken seriously by those who are in a position to do something about it.

This has given tenants and campaigners more than just a negative demand – it gives them a fully worked out alternative to campaign for, one that is making headway at every level. DCH has fought a long battle in every space it could just to keep council housing alive, but now the economic crisis is creating an opening for its positive alternative.

The challenge now is to keep up the pressure and force Gordon Brown to turn his words into action.

Alternative home sweet home

admin — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:05:00 +0000

Regular stories of rising house prices and a buoyant housing rental market may seem like good news for homeowners, but there are increasing numbers of people for whom the ability to rent, let alone buy, a house is out of reach. This has been exacerbated by the reduction in council housing stock through privatisation. But people have always experimented with alternative housing solutions. Here we detail a few options that are being practised in Britain. All deal with the three C’s: cost, community, and control.

Squatting

Squatting is usually the cheapest housing option and there are residential squats in many cities. Squatting is still legal and squatters have legal rights if they can show evidence of residence in an unoccupied building. However, it can also be a rather temporary solution, especially if the landlord decides to skip the niceties.

Low impact development

An option at the more affordable end of the self-build scale is a low impact development (LID). A roundhouse made from wood and mud (cob walls) with a grass roof, such as Tony’s at Brithir Mawr in Wales, only costs £3,000 to build. It is also self-sufficient, using solar and wind power for electricity and a wood stove for heat.

Lammas Low Impact Initiatives is establishing a low impact village in Wales. Working with Pembrokeshire’s innovative LID policy, Lammas plans a settlement of 20 small holdings on 175 acres. The eco-village will showcase a range of highly sustainable building and living solutions, with the Stage 1 planning application to be submitted in April 2007.

Lammas is a co-operative industrial and provident society (IPS) and is launching public shares in the project. These offer everyone the opportunity to invest in building the low impact movement as the money raised will help fund not only the Pembrokeshire development but also a network of projects across the UK.

Low impact buildings are generally constructed out of onsite and waste materials. The Brighton Earthship, for example, is entirely heated by the sun and was made from tyres rammed full of earth, with waste cans and bottles filling the gaps between the tyres.

Housing co-operatives

Such solutions offer more than just low cost alternatives. Key to their aim is to reinvigorate a sense of community in the ways in which we live. Not everyone has the time or desire to build their own home and finding land in urban areas can be problematic.

With this in mind, housing cooperatives are increasingly popular in British cities. They allow collective management of a property by the tenants and for the building to be owned in common. To raise the money to buy a building housing co-ops also become IPS’s that issue public loan stock. A long running example is the Cornerstone housing co-op in Leeds.

Co-housing

Co-housing is an arrangement whereby private dwellings are organised to encourage collaborative living while maintaining individual space. The houses share communal facilities such as workshops, open space, a playground and often a community building where residents can meet and share meals as they wish.

Cars tend to be kept to the edge of the site to create a more ‘people friendly’ space. The design thus encourages, but does not impose, interaction and community ties. The Springhill cohousing project in Stroud is one example; another is being established in Lancaster.

Diggers and dreamers

A good place to start with any of these options is to read Diggers and Dreamers: The guide to communal living, which lists most ongoing communities in Britain.

Community control

What is crucial to all these examples is that the control of the property remains not just with those living in it but with the wider community. These approaches challenge the profit-generating process of private ownership. This ability to control the spaces in which we live ranges from collective management to democratic ownership.

A tenant management organisation is where tenants form a management co-operative, a committee or a not-for-profit company to make an agreement with the property owner. This agreement can include taking care of maintenance in return for reduced rent or direct payment from the owner.

A more radical approach to ownership is to establish a community land trust. Land is moved permanently from private ownership into a trust for the benefit of the community. As the land can never then be sold, its value and appreciation does not threaten its use for community projects such as agriculture, workshops or residential dwellings. It is a form of democratic ownership by the local community, who consequently are able to use it in sustainable ways (see, for example, Stroud Community Agriculture.Paul Chatterton set up a housing co-op in Leeds and is involved in setting up a co-housing project in the north of England; Larch Maxey lives off-grid in a wooden chalet and is a co-founder and core group member of Lammas; Jenny Pickerill is building an eco-house – see www.autonomousgeographies.org

Squatting for beginners

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 21:19:00 +0000

Why squat?

It’s still legal, necessary and free. Squatting is a matter of civil law, not a crime. You might be a single person without the capital for private renting. You might be a family declared “intentionally homeless’ or otherwise excluded from public housing. You might be a destitute asylum seeker. You might be displaced from your home by “regeneration’. Or perhaps you’ve moved to find work. Squatting is hard work and has its problems, but it’s better than the alternatives. Some people find that the closeness and teamwork involved, the laughs as well as the crises, open up a whole new world and change their lives.

Getting organised

Squatting an empty building without any information may be necessary in an emergency, but your prospects will be better if you do your homework and choose carefully. You can usually discover who the owner is from the Land Registry (call 020 7917 8888 for your nearest office; enquiries cost £4 in person, or £2 with a credit/debit card). It’s best to pick places owned by public bodies (including housing associations) or commercial organisations. Privately owned places are rarely worthwhile unless they’ve been empty a long time or you have some extra information. Most empty buildings can’t be returned to use without planning consent, so check the statutory register of planning consents at the local council.

Don’t go for council or housing association homes in good condition. There’s a quick and nasty way of getting you out without a court case if you squat a place for which a new tenant, or protected intending occupier (PIO), has signed up. However, most attempts to use the PIO procedure are bogus. Contact the Advisory Service for Squatters for advice. Generally, the worse condition a place is in, the better your prospects are.

It’s best not to squat on your own: get together with a few others. A squat is only a squat while there’s someone on the premises. If nobody’s in, there’s nothing to stop the owner breaking in and repossessing the place. However, if anybody – including the owner – tries to gain entry when someone opposed to their doing so is in, it’s a criminal offence. So, you need enough people to make sure someone is always at home – at least for the first few weeks.

The basics

Once you’ve found a suitable place, how do you get in? Many buildings are less secure than the owners think. Check the back if possible, and consider upper windows or the roof. Remember, squatters never do criminal damage; local kids do that, and squatters just come along the next day and take advantage of it. People dressed as building workers usually have less hassle than suspicious types sneaking round at night. Once you’re in, steel doors and window screens can be removed from the inside, but your first job will be to make sure your entry route is secured.

You’ll need to change the lock or fit some big bolts inside the door temporarily. Then you can start making a home. It’s best to sign up for a legitimate electricity supply. Otherwise, it gives the owner a chance to get you arrested for abstracting electricity so they can repossess the place while you’re in the cells. Make friendly contact with the neighbours, who can turn out to be your best supporters. Making the outside of the place attractive helps this along.

Squats get evicted sooner or later. Normally, this will be the result of the owner issuing proceedings in the county court on the grounds of trespass. You might get only a few days’ notice of the court case. Owners often make mistakes, and it can be worth defending cases to gain extra time or to highlight the waste of useful buildings. Sometimes a court case can be an opportunity to do a deal with the owner, so you can stay until the place is actually used. This is most likely with commercial organisations, for whom you could act as free caretakers and could be far preferable to the crack dealers who might occupy the premises otherwise. Defending court cases can be complicated, so it’s important to get immediate advice. Usually, bailiffs will come to evict you between one and four weeks after the case, which gives you time to find another place.

For more detailed advice, get the Squatters Handbook from the Advisory Service for Squatters, or contact the service: www.squatter.org.uk