Tag: housing law

Property Guardians: Tenants, Licences and HMO’s

Posted on by foluke.adebisi

by David Sheldon, The Law School, University of Bristol

 

Property guardianship is a relatively new phenomenon in England and Wales. Property guardianship has taken hold in urban areas across the country and is now performed by a sizeable minority. Government estimates suppose that between 5-7000 individuals are currently acting as property guardians whereas more recent measures suggest around 35,000 now occupy a room or space as a property guardian. Such numbers are likely to be an under-estimate signalling that property guardianship is not a niche form of occupation undertaken by eccentric young adults and popularised by the Channel Four comedy Crashing. (more…)

Planning Law and the Housing Crisis in Bristol

Posted on by legalresearch

By Mr Ed Burtonshaw-Gunn, PhD Researcher and Land Law Tutor (University of Bristol Law School).

The housing crisis ignites local and national media coverage. It is near impossible to pick up a newspaper or turn on the evening news without reading or hearing a story about the nation’s obsession with (or need for) housing. Soaring house prices, new housebuilding targets championed by politicians or think tanks, or calls to abolish on the much-loved green belt land protection are all on the news agenda. Yet, while covering these stories the media often focus on the effects of the housing crisis, and not the root cause(s). My research is examining how planning law, policy, and practice, shape the production of housing in Bristol, and argues that the housing crisis can be fundamentally reduced to one major factor. For 40 years, the supply of new housing has failed to meet nation’s demand.

On the 6th December, I was invited to present my research to the Property Network of the Bristol Junior Chamber. The audience was made up of a range of Bristol housing stakeholders; property and planning lawyers, planning engagement and public-relations consultants, and housing association managers. The presentation covered three areas; the national housing crisis, house building in Bristol, and a prominent finding from my research, the importance and methods of delivering affordable housing in Bristol. (more…)

Closing the Gaps: Health and Safety in the Home

Posted on by legalresearch

By Dave Cowan, Professor of Law and Policy (University of Bristol Law School).

Following a commission from Shelter, the housing charity, Dave Cowan and Edward Burtonshaw-Gunn, University of Bristol Law School, and Helen Carr and Ed Kirton-Darling, University of Kent Law School, conducted research into the law and practice around housing standards.  Their conclusions – which draw on 940 responses to a questionnaire from professionals, landlords and occupiers – make for stark reading about the deficiencies in our current law.  This is the Executive Summary to the report.  The full report can be found at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/research/grenfell/.

The law relating to health and safety in people’s homes is piecemeal, out-dated, complex, dependent upon tenure, and patchily enforced. It makes obscure distinctions, which have little relationship with everyday experiences of poor conditions. Tenants wanting to remedy defects face numerous and often insurmountable barriers to justice. The law needs to evolve; no longer should occupiers be treated as posing health and safety risks; instead they should be treated as consumers of housing with enforceable rights to ensure minimum standards are adhered to. The state needs to accept its role as the primary enforcer of those standards.

Not only does the law require reform, there also needs to be a cultural change, so that those responsible for the health and safety of occupiers become pro-active in fulfilling those responsibilities.

We recommend a new Housing (Health and Safety in the Home) Act which is tenure neutral, modern and relevant to contemporary health and safety issues, and which encourages and provides resources for pro-activity by statutory authorities. In particular, the Act should

  • Strengthen duties on local authorities to review housing and enforce housing health and safety standards
  • Introduce a legal duty to review and update all guidance relating to health and safety in the home every three years
  • Provide routes for occupiers to require local authorities to carry out housing health and safety assessments
  • Remove unnecessary legal barriers preventing enforcement action being taken against local authority landlords and remove unnecessary procedural barriers which undermine the current regime
  • Consolidate and up-date existing law
  • Place clear responsibilities on bodies for breaches of fire and building regulations
  • Provide routes for occupiers to hold landlords and managers to account for fire safety provisions
  • Strengthen remedies against retaliatory eviction

Such an Act, either working alongside or incorporating a Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act, would not only improve health and safety outcomes for occupiers, it would signify also that, as a society, we accept responsibility for those standards.

Homelessness internal reviews – The long view

Posted on by legalresearch

By Prof Dave Cowan, Professor of Law and Policy (University of Bristol Law School)*

imagesApplicants for homelessness assistance who are aggrieved by a local authority’s discretionary decision against their interests, can request a review of that decision.  These reviews are an incredibly important part of the homelessness decision-making process – a negative decision made by a local authority can leave an applicant with what one Judge has described as the “mark of Cain”.  An applicant who does not seek a review cannot appeal a negative decision; if the applicant does appeal their decision, but fails to make all the relevant points, judicial guidance is that such matters cannot be raised on a subsequent appeal.  So, both substance and procedure are in play at this crucial stage of internal review.

Since the early 1990s, myself and my colleagues Caroline Hunter and Simon Halliday, (both currently at York Law School) have conducted research in to homelessness internal reviews—on which we published The Appeal of Internal Review. Law, Administrative Justice and the (non-) Emergence of Disputes (Hart 2003) and ‘Adjudicating the implementation of homelessness law: The promise of socio-legal studies’ (2006) 21(3) Housing studies 381. Our research has been both qualitative and quantitative. (more…)