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Landlords go to court
• HOUSING associations are increasingly thinking and acting as private landlords. In September last year, Steve Douglas, the then acting chief executive of the Housing Corporation, predicted that a number of housing associations would soon have more in common with Barratt Homes than with community-based landlords.
Circle 33, for example, is part of the bigger Circle Anglia, which has expanded massively through transfers of council homes and building homes for rent and sale. Now owning 45,000 homes, it aims to double its size within the next five years.
However, even now almost half the private homes produced by housing associations are sitting empty. Making up for this loss of revenue will mean relying a great deal more on tenants’ rents, not only to cover maintenance of homes but also the cost of such overreaching development plans.
Those at particular risk of a “heavier hand” by their landlord in terms of rent arrears will be those trying to get off benefits and to enter low-paid and erratic employment, and those whose “life chances” the housing associations suggest they are attempting to help.
By virtue of the assured tenancies used by housing associations, they can take tenants who are in only eight weeks rent arrears to court and, if they do, the court is obliged (it is mandatory) to issue a possession order – the reason presumably that Rosalyn Black found herself homeless (Evicted tenant fights on to clear her name, November 7). As her case demonstrates, repossession is no longer a case of last resort. Nor is hers an isolated case.
According to a Citizens Advice Bureau report, there has been an increase in housing associations using this particular ground for eviction, with the inevitable consequence that, as with Ms Black, “there has been some defence”. Factor in looming recession and disaster beckons.
Sharon Hayward
Independent Working Class Association, WC1
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