The First Squatter Is Jailed Since Being Homeless Was Criminalised by the Tories

This afternoon, on my way back from a disturbing bike ride around Mayfair, where money is almost literally oozing out of every orifice of those who find it easier than ever to enrich themselves at the expense of society as a whole, I arrived back at Charing Cross, to catch the train back to south east London, where I was confronted by the front page of the Evening Standard announcing, “London Squatter First to Be Jailed,” which threw me into an angry depression.

The squatter in question — actually a 21-year old from Portsmouth, Alex Haigh, who only arrived in London in July — is indeed the first person to be jailed for squatting since the law on squatting was changed on September 1, transforming it from a civil to a criminal offence, punishable by a six-month prison sentence and a £5,000 fine.

Haigh was given a 12-week sentence after pleading guilty to squatting a property in Pimlico owned by the housing association L&Q (London & Quadrant), which, ironically, is supposed to be in the business of providing homes to those in need, like all providers of social housing. He is now in Wormwood Scrubs, where his accommodation for the next three months will be provided by the British taxpayer. Depriving people of their liberty costs, on average, between £27,000 and £29,000 a year, and £2.2 billion is spent in total on the 80,000-plus prisoners in England and Wales.

Surely, if we are faced with such a pressing need to cut costs, as the government asserts with grindingly monotonous regularity, it would be worthwhile not spending around £7,000 on depriving a 21-year old of his liberty for having stayed in an empty flat. Haigh’s father Peter, who runs a construction business in Plymouth, accurately told the Evening Standard, “They have made an example of him. To put him in that prison environment, I don’t understand it. If he broke the law he should be dealt with but it is like putting someone who has not paid their tax into Dartmoor Prison.”

The right-wing spin on the story has been predictable. The Evening Standard — which is the only excuse for a newspaper in the whole of London — claimed that the new law “was brought in amid a squatting crisis in London as organised eastern European gangs and other squatters targeted family homes.” This managed to play a racist card, and to stir up unwarranted fears about squatters taking over people’s houses while they popped out to the shops for a pint of milk, which are totally unfounded and/or dangerously inflammatory.

The truth is that the processes that were in place to deal with squatting before September 1 were perfectly adequate, and what the new law, which was designed to appeal to right-wing Tories, does is to protect those who sit on empty properties while there is a genuine housing crisis — one in which, to cite the example of London, a huge number of people find it impossible to pay the astronomical rents that unprincipled and unregulated landlords are charging.

Throughout the country, there are almost a million empty properties, and a comparable number of people in need of shelter. At any one time, there are around 50,000 squatters, who, tonight, must be fearing the worst. While the criminalisation of their need for shelter ought to appal anyone who believes that homes, rather than prisons, are suitable places for the homeless, the cheerleaders for adding to Britain’s overcrowded prisons by stuffing them full of homeless people have also not done their sums. As the Guardian reported in March this year:

The cost of a new law to further criminalise squatting could run to almost 20 times official estimates, wiping out government legal aid budget savings, according to the findings of a newly published report.

The study, commissioned by Squatters’ Action for Secure Homes (Squash) and supported by academics and politicians including a former Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson, finds that the Ministry of Justice’s new law fails to account for extra spending on housing benefit squatters will claim once they are evicted.

The Can We Afford to Criminalise Squatting? report, published on [March 16, 2012], finds the total costs of the law — clause 136 in the Legal Aid and Punishment of Offenders Bill (Lapso) — could run to between £316.2m and £790.4m over five years, depending on the number of squatters in England and Wales. This compares with the £350m in savings the MoJ hopes to make by cutting the legal aid budget.

Every time I wake up and ask what’s happening in my country, I find that the Tory idiots who claim to be in charge are almost unable to sleep, as they’re kept so busy rushing from one group of vulnerable people to another, making sure that all of them get a good kicking.

Squatting is based on need — a need for shelter, which is a fundamental human right. There may be the odd example of opportunism, and even of pointedly bad behaviour, but the law that has just imprisoned a 21-year old — and very possibly ruined his future — for something that could have been sorted out without him getting a criminal record is a cruel law indeed, and one of which all decent people should be ashamed.

*****

Below, I’m cross-posting an article by that was published in the Guardian on August 31, the day before squatting became a criminal offence, which was written by Joseph Blake, Squash’s press officer. I had meant to cross-post it earlier, under the heading, “Criminalising Squatting: The Hideous Triumph of Greedy Right-Wing Property Owners,” in which my first line would have been, “Britain — or England in particular — is under the control of a government with no redeeming features whatsoever, but in this world of cruelty, stupidity and cynicism, the decision to criminalise squatting is a new low.”

I had also intended to draw on another Guardian article, by George Monbiot, published in January, written when the House of Lords was about to consider the bill containing the proposal for criminalising squatting, which he described as “a cruel and unnecessary clause, whose purpose is to protect landlords who keep their houses empty.” Succinctly, Monbiot explained the situation that existed until September 1, and here are the quotes I’d planned to use, because they describe all that is wrong with the criminalisation of squatting:

Under current law, if squatters move into your home (or a home that you are soon to occupy) and fail to leave the moment you ask, the police can immediately remove them. The only houses with weaker protections are those that remain empty. There are 700,000 such homes in England alone, almost half of which have been empty for a long time. They have long been a refuge for street sleepers and other homeless people. Landlords already possess civil powers to remove them, and the police can step in if squatters ignore the court orders.

Last year the government launched a consultation on criminalising all squatting in residential buildings; 96% of the respondents argued that no change in the law was necessary. But on 1 November, just five days after the consultation ended, the government jemmied an amendment into the legal aid bill, already halfway towards approval. This meant that the House of Commons had no chance to scrutinise it properly, and objectors had no chance to explain the issues to their MPs.

The result of this blatant insult to democracy is that people who have housed themselves at no cost to anyone are likely to be summarily evicted. Houses will fall back into disuse, and the government’s housing bill will rise: by between £35m and £90m, according to the campaign group Squash. Worse still, the new law will help unscrupulous landlords to evict tenants where there is no written contract, by declaring them squatters and calling the police.

And finally, for now, here’s Joseph Blake’s article:

Criminalising squatting hurts the poor and benefits the rich

By Joseph Blake, The Guardian, August 31, 2012

This rightwing law protects unscrupulous landlords and property speculators keeping properties empty to maximise profits

From Saturday, a massively unjust, unnecessary and unaffordable new law will come into force in England and Wales. In the middle of one of the worst housing crises this country has ever seen, up to 50,000 squatters who are currently squatting in empty properties across the UK face becoming criminals, and this because they are occupying abandoned residential properties to put a roof over their heads.

Of course, we have all heard the horror stories of the innocent homeowner who “goes out to buy a pint of milk and comes back to find their home squatted” – and we have sympathy with this situation. But most people don’t realise that such instances are extremely rare and overplayed in the media for political gain. They are also already a criminal offence, and homeowners are already strongly protected by existing legislation. One hundred and sixty leading legal figures wrote to the Guardian to explain this point.

In the face of this new law, thousands of vulnerable people will possibly become criminals overnight, facing up to six months in jail and fines of up to £5,000. With homelessness rates rising and the number of empty properties currently in the region of more than 930,000 according to the Empty Homes Agency, we must ask: who is this law protecting? It protects unscrupulous landlords and property speculators who are keeping properties empty to up their profits. The new law encourages these properties to remain empty and is worryingly open to abuse by rogue landlords, which could mean trouble for tenants.

96% of responses to the government’s consultation didn’t want to see any action taken on squatting, but the government ignored the results of its own consultation. What is the point of even having a consultation in the first place? Out of 2,217 responses, 2,126 of those were from members of the public concerned about the impact of criminalising squatting, and only 10 people bothered to write in claiming to be victims of squatting.

On top of all this, the new law is completely unaffordable. Squash produced a report while the law was going through the House of Lords – after it bypassed the normal process in the Commons – which shows that this law will cost the taxpayer £790m over five years. The report concludes that this law alone will wipe out the entire expected costs of the legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill, which is supposed to be a cost-cutting bill.

Unlikely bedfellows such as the Metropolitan police, The Law Society, The Criminal Bar Association and numerous Homeless Charities such as Crisis have come out strongly against it and squatters know they have this on their side. We believe that possibly even the government ministers pushing this through will admit it is not popular legislation.

So how has this all happened? The political process that has criminalised squatting in residential properties was undertaken by an elite minority who actively ignored the opinions of the vulnerable and their advocates. Using manipulative rhetoric and purposefully obfuscatory propaganda to delegitimise the experiences and arguments of opponents, they made their decisions in the dark hours of the night and in scripted performances, deploying authoritarian and discretionary power. This is a sham democracy.

The attack against squatting has always been a rightwing ploy to defend and enhance private property rights over the human right to shelter. New groups have sprung up to support and defend squats from evictions in response to the new law, so it could get nasty in the next few weeks. Who can blame them? They have nowhere else to go.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.