Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Joan Ruddock Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

The legal redress is to ask them to leave. If the squatters refuse to leave, they are committing a criminal offence. That is the point.

In September 160 housing lawyers wrote an open letter accusing Ministers and politicians of distorting public debate by making inaccurate statements about the law on squatting. I claim that that is exactly what is going on in the House tonight.

Even the Metropolitan police and the Association of Chief Police Officers believe that the current squatting law is sufficient and that a new one would be a waste of police resources that could impact negatively on community relations. We need to see instead efforts increased to enforce the current law properly and swiftly, including better training for police officers.

As many Opposition Members have said, many homeless people are pushed into squatting and do not do so out of choice. The appalling and often dangerous conditions in many squats are hardly attractive. Research by Crisis shows that 40% of single homeless people escape the horrors of rough sleeping by squatting, mostly in disused properties. These are the people who are most likely to be affected by the proposed new law, and who will be unnecessarily criminalised.

Often homeless people will suffer from multiple diagnoses, with a combination of mental ill health, substance abuse and other problems. The challenge is to ensure that practical measures are put in place so that people with the most complex multiple needs can be supported more effectively and squatting avoided in the first place.

[Joan Ruddock]

(Lewisham and Deptford): In my surgeries now for the first time I am seeing people who are not in the categories that the hon. Lady has just described. I am seeing people in work who are losing their accommodation; they cannot keep going in the private sector on the wages that they earn. Those people are becoming homeless without any access to other provision, and some of them will turn to squatting, and I can well understand why.

[Caroline Lucas]

That is exactly the point I was about to come on to. In my surgeries in Brighton, Pavilion we are seeing levels of homelessness rising. People are coming to me in exactly the situation that the right hon. Lady describes. According to figures from the Department of Work and Pensions, 840 people in Brighton and Hove risk losing their homes as a result of the proposed changes to the shared accommodation rate of housing benefit, making this area of Brighton one of the worst affected in the whole country. So Government efforts must focus much more on tackling the root cause of the problem, not on penalising vulnerable homeless people, including those living in buildings that have been empty for long periods and are not about to be brought back into use.

Part of the solution is investment in affordable housing and so, too, are measures to bring empty properties back into use as soon as possible. Brighton and Hove city council was named 2011 practitioner of the year by the Empty Homes Network for bringing 154 properties back into use over the past 12 months alone. The council’s amazing success is down to the hard work it has put into identifying empty private properties and its commitment to working with the owners of those properties where possible.

Insufficient work is still being done about empty properties nationally. The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell), admitted in response to my oral question that only 46 empty home management orders had been issued in the full five years since they were brought in. That and other steps to tackle the lack of affordable housing in my constituency and elsewhere must be given far more priority than playing political football with the roofs over people’s heads.

As many other Members have pointed out, the way the proposal has been brought to the House is completely unacceptable. To say that it was rushed is no exaggeration. This is not proper scrutiny; laws made in this way can only end in problems. The Government’s consultation on squatting closed only three weeks ago and I am sure I am not the only person who suspects that the 2,217 responses have not yet been fully analysed, especially as I understand that more than 96% of them expressed real concern about the impact of criminalising squatting. What is more, the option we are asked to consider today was not even included in the consultation.

In conclusion, there is no denying that some high-profile cases raise serious concerns about the need to enforce better existing laws on squatting, but criminalising vulnerable homeless people is inhumane, undemocratic and, crucially, unnecessary.