Written evidence submitted by The Housing Law Practitioners' Association (TH0027)
- The Housing Law Practitioners Association (HLPA) is a forum for practitioners working in the housing field to share knowledge and information. Membership is open to all those who use housing law for the benefit of the homeless, tenants, and other occupiers of housing. Current members include solicitors, barristers, advice workers, independent environmental health officers and other housing specialists.
- Our members are involved day in day out with assisting vulnerable people who are trying to access the support they need from their local authority having been rendered homeless or threatened with homelessness.
- We wish to make this submission in order to highlight to the Committee that the experience of our clients in trying to access support has, in many areas, been getting increasingly worse as the now acknowledged housing crisis has escalated.
Gatekeeping
- In our experience, in spite of the new duties on local authorities introduced in the Homelessness Reduction Act, gatekeeping, where local authorities use various means to: prevent or discourage homeless people from making applications for homelessness assistance; refusing to accept applications; or failing to comply with their legal duty to provide interim (emergency) accommodation, continues to be an issue and indeed appears in some areas to be significantly on the rise. It seems very apparent that this is often (is as a result of rising homelessness and the resulting pressure on local authorities.
- Examples of common gatekeeping processes include:
- Insisting on applicants making of online applications, which many are not equipped to do;
- Failing to provide adequate means for applicants to make face to face applications (more and more prevalent since the Covid 19 pandemic);
- Booking initial appointments days or even weeks after the date of the application for assistance, even where the applicant is street homeless;
- Telling applicants that there is no duty to accept an application or to provide interim (emergency) accommodation in circumstances where this is not, or may not, be the case – for example, telling applicants that they do not have a local connection and therefore accommodation will not be provided (instead of providing accommodation and going through the appropriate referral mechanisms);
- Discouraging applicants from applying by suggesting to them there is no point in doing so because they will be found intentionally homeless (even though the relief and interim accommodation duties may still be owed).
- Telling applicants there is no reason to believe that they have a priority need and therefore interim (emergency) accommodation will not be provided even though it is subsequently accepted when challenged by our members that there is reason to believe the applicant has a priority need.
- Such practices, well known among our members, have been more in the public eye in recent years; ITV journalist Daniel Hewitt's podcast “The Trapped” featured an episode where the journalist was so concerned about the well-being of a vulnerable homeless woman and her family who had no way of contacting Enfield Council to make a homeless application that he tweeted the Council to shame them into getting in touch with her and offering emergency accommodation.
Provision of unsuitable accommodation
- It is increasingly the case that homeless applicants to whom accommodation duties have been accepted (both during the relief duty stage and after acceptance of the main housing duty s.193 Housing Act 1996) are placed in profoundly unsuitable accommodation.
- Local Authorities are regularly placing families with children in hotel and B and B accommodation, sometimes for significantly more than 8 weeks in breach of the art.2 Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2003 SI 2003/3326.
- Hotel and B and B accommodation used is often wholly unsuitable for the purposes of housing homeless people, for example being located at service stations with little or no public transport links.
- Leicester City Council recently refused to pay the compensation that the Ombudsman suggested it should pay to a homeless woman after she and her family spent over 6 weeks in hotel accommodation because they said that they have no choice. This goes to the way that some local authorities have been emboldened to argue that the 6 weeks shouldn’t apply even though that is what Parliament has, quite rightly, legislated for.
- Single homeless people are often housed in such accommodation for many, many months, even after the full homeless duty has been accepted.
- When claims for judicial review are issued against authorities for failing to provide suitable accommodation, Local Authorities will often resist applications for injunctive relief on the basis that they are unable for financial reasons to provide suitable accommodation, and even where injunctive relief is provided applicants will often not be moved and advocates need to apply to enforce orders.
Observation on LA practices
- While we recognize that local authorities are under huge pressure due to rising homelessness caused by a variety of factors, and we also recognize that local authority budgets have been unacceptably squeezed in recent years, it seems clear that a lack of longer- term planning is leading to the situation being significantly worse than it should be, at great cost not only to the vulnerable clients we represent but also to the local authorities themselves.
- If, as is required by law, local authorities had proper procurement policies in place for temporary accommodation which they revisited regularly, and which included procurement of their own accommodation (whether by purchase or through a lease) they would not find themselves routinely in a position of running out of suitable accommodation and having to pay extortionate rates to place applicants in unsuitable hotel accommodation and pay out eye-watering sums to private landlords in housing benefit. The Supreme Court made clear the importance of such procurement policies in the case of Nzolameso v Westminster in April 2015. Ten years on nothing has improved and no local authority seems to have effectively taken steps to plan effectively for this. It isn't just the funding impacts of inflation or pandemic- this failure to properly plan and procure has much longer roots. Their failure to plan a decade ago, meant they didn’t have an effective plan for this issue and that has left them exposed. Better funding would obviously make it easier, but it is not enough on its own. Ingenuity is so often employed to try to avoid legal duties. If just part of that ingenuity was used to find ways to meet their duties, our clients would find it much easier to access support.
- There is a cultural failure that goes beyond just money - there is a feeling that those in need of these services are not worth the costs associated with assisting them. This is clear from cursory reading of a lot of housing needs assessment which basically often say that as the applicant is in receipt of benefits the housing cap on LHA or benefits means they will not be able to find affordable housing in their borough (in London). It is notable that in the phase 2 Grenfell Inquiry report they found that RBKC had discriminated against survivors in the immediate aftermath by placing them in unsuitable accommodation. It was also documented in the hearing how some of those displaced by the fire slept in parks or their car for days afterwards because they were told they were not in priority need, even though they were displaced as a result of fire (which is a defined category that automatically bestows priority need for housing.
- Funding has not been put into understanding or accounting for the trauma of being homeless or for the trauma that might have led that person to become homeless. Until funding and training in this issue is rolled out the homelessness services are likely to further traumatise applicants and will not obtain a full and accurate history to assess their needs for housing.
November 2024