Housing

 

Our Housing advisers are Richard Hazell and Forbes Robertson

Richard Hazell              Forbes Robertson

Demand for Housing law advice has remained strong throughout the past year, but the local scene reflects the national changes in tenure and private finances.

 

The pre-action protocol on mortgage arrears has led the High Street lenders to change their ways and to be more reasonable in the offers of settlement to which they are willing to agree, but smaller fringe lenders still need to be reminded of the protocol and its intention to make possession proceedings a last resort.  We run the Possession Day Duty Rota with Shearer and Co. and this provides an opportunity to advise Defendants before their hearings.  More lenders are now willing to settle for the mortgage interest paid by the Job Centre Plus, but this may change as a result of the reduction in the nationally set interest rate.

 

The recovery of deposits and the effect of their non-registration remains an interesting area of work.  Again, landlords who use letting agents do comply with the law, but some smaller landlords are unaware of their legal duties and of the impact of their breach of the law.  The legislation is now recognised to have been badly drafted and is ambivalent in its interpretation – we await the decision of two cases before the Court of Appeal for clarification.

 

Due to the rise of the private rented sector, we see fewer homeless enquirers, but we suspect that this is because the Council’s Housing Options Team are under pressure from central government not to allow people to apply to be accepted as homeless and thus to refer them to private landlords.  The government calls this ‘the prevention agenda’ – we and others call it ‘gate keeping’.  Either way it results in a potential loss of legal rights, as the applicant does not receive a s.184 decision letter with attendant right of appeal.

 

We continue to attend twice a week at the Homeless Day Centre on Broad Street and provide moral and legal support to its service users and the outreach team.  The problems may be small but they are significant to those involved.  We have also attended the meetings of the Homeless Day Centre Steering Group which has aimed to try and find other premises but so far without success. 

 

 

 

There are now quarterly meetings of HOSTS and we still service this group.  Angus Macpherson has helped the group by the co-ordination of statistics about the extent of use of local agencies during the recession and a Press Release has recently been issued on this.