Kerry McCarthy
Main Page: Kerry McCarthy (Labour - Bristol East)(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Raynsford
I entirely understand that if someone has been guilty of trashing their home, their estate or the area immediately surrounding where they live, it would be appropriate under normal procedures for action to be taken to seek possession of their property because of their behaviour, but a different issue arises if people who have been charged and even convicted of a criminal offence are then deprived of their tenure when they would not be so deprived if they had been convicted of such an offence outside a riot. In the example that I gave, if someone stole some DVDs or videos from an electronics shop during a riot and was, as a result, subject to possession proceedings, it would send an odd message if that applied in that case, but not in the case of someone who had been convicted of stealing videos from an electronics shop in other circumstances. That seems to be the nub of the problem. Tenancy laws must be applied, and they must be applied in relation to the tenancy and its surrounding area, not used as a second means of punishing people who should be punished under the proper processes of the law.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that, in some cases, councils have talked about using eviction laws to punish a whole family where just one person has been involved in rioting? One case, which was announced soon after the riots, involved a mother and her younger son being threatened with eviction because the 17-year-old son was involved in rioting some distance from the home. The mother and her younger son were entirely innocent, but the younger boy was going to be made homeless as a result of something his older brother had done.
Mr Raynsford
My hon. Friend raises an important and complex issue. I hope she will understand that so as to keep my remarks brief I will not go into detail, although she may wish to refer to it in her speech. It is clearly problematic if an attempt to use tenancy law is applied to a wider range of people, including the family of the tenant in question, who have to respond in relation to a particular criminal activity perpetrated by one individual. That area requires thoughtful, rather than knee-jerk, reactions.