The defendant is a widow in her 80s, disabled with osteoarthritis – and set to be made homeless in two hours. Her husband of 60 years, who was also disabled, died of cancer early this year. Shortly after, their landlords relaunched eviction proceedings against her under section 21 of the Housing Act – the infamous “no fault” evictions that the government promised to ban back in 2019 but which nonetheless still exist.
We are in a modern, slightly sterile courtroom at Watford county court on a mild morning in November. Due to her disability – the defendant walks with a frame – she is “attending” via a video link that only the judge can see. Her adult son, who is with her, does most of the talking on her behalf. The only time she speaks during the hearing, she sounds distressed.
The judge is stern and by-the-book – and the book is not in her favour. Both she and her husband were originally from India, and had been renting their home since 2014. In 2021 her landlords tried to evict them under section 21 but failed on procedural grounds. In February 2023 they mounted an appeal, triggering a legal tug-of-war that is now reaching a traumatic climax. The landlords have a warrant to evict her at midday today. It is 10am.
Today’s duty solicitor, Ruth Camp from housing charity Shelter, is casting around for any way to persuade the judge to grant a stay of execution.
“As it stands at the moment, the defendant doesn’t have anywhere to go,“ Camp tells the judge.
“How is that relevant?”
The judge is cold, but he’s right – the matter at hand is whether he, in the county court, has the power to allow the tenant’s appeal against the warrant. Her appeal was filed here, but it should have been filed with the high court. The judge in this courtroom in Watford does not have “jurisdiction”, as he keeps repeating. The crisis facing the defendant doesn’t come into it.
This is how it is at the sharp end of the housing crisis. Camp is a duty solicitor – she’s on duty, on the day, at the court, available for people there who need her. She has only had the briefest prior notice of what this case is about; she is not the tenant’s regular lawyer. The tenant doesn’t have a regular lawyer. The disabled widow in her 80s with limited English can’t afford to retain a lawyer – she relies on her son to try to navigate an often bewildering system.
They filed their appeal with the county court in March and say they weren’t told until mid-October that they had to go to the high court instead. At that point they got bogged down writing to the county court trying to delay the eviction. And now it’s too late.
The judge’s view is that they had enough warning and didn’t act on it by going to the high court.
“The court is satisfied that it has no jurisdiction to grant a stay to the warrant, and therefore the application [to delay the eviction] is dismissed,” he says. “Unless there’s a stay at the high court, the bailiffs will be attending at noon today.”
Over the video link, the tenant’s son sounds stressed. He tries to ask the judge for more time.
“I have no jurisdiction to do that.”
Camp asks the judge if he can provide an easy contact process for the high court to try to file a last-ditch appeal.
“Nope, and it is not for me to advise the defendant.”
After the hearing, I ask Camp about the tenant and her son filing the appeal to the wrong court. “That’s at the heart of a lot of people’s problems,” she says. “They don’t have representation.”
The number of homeless people in England is rising. The number of children living in “temporary” accommodation – the so-called “hidden homeless” – has reached 139,000: a record high. A housing crisis once focused on London has spread ever further. Rents have risen sharply. Housing benefit has been cut and is placed beyond the reach of many immigrants by law.
A failure to build enough housing of all types over the course of decades, the demolition of social housing stock ever since the Thatcher right-to-buy revolution, and the scant legal rights granted to tenants have combined with both the direct and indirect impact of austerity to produce scenes like this morning’s in Watford County Court every day throughout the country.
Before lunch everything is rushed. A row of people sit in the corridor outside the courtroom, on the other side of the door to Camp’s makeshift office. Among them is a landlord couple a few yards away from the tenant they are trying to evict.
Due to the sheer volume of cases, as the courts try to whittle down their huge backlog, Camp gets just a few minutes with clients before they are whisked into court – clients who, as a duty solicitor, she has only just met. In those snatched moments she must skim through their case files, ask the client questions – and above all, see if the landlord has followed the correct procedure. The only defence against section 21 is a technicality.
The tenants range from the distraught to the bullish – some have been looking forward to their “day in court”, especially when it follows long-running disputes over disrepair. “I’ve had no heating for 12 years in my flat,” Robert tells me. He is 54 now, but he was 42 when he moved into his flat in Hertfordshire. The mental-health impact of someone trying to kill themselves under his lorry forced him out of work and into a flat without a boiler. Not without a functioning boiler – without any boiler.
He has brought photographs. Two radiators have not been plumbed in – their pipes are a short track to a dead end. A small plug-in radiator heats the entire flat. Sometimes the prepay electricity meter cuts out before his benefits payment arrives. “You have two days to budget. Do you eat? Do you go cold?” He ends up sleeping on the settee in front of the TV with the lights off and the door closed.
Robert tried to get his husband-and-wife landlords to fix the problems. But about seven years ago, he says, they warned him that if he kept complaining they would evict him and he would find himself – in their words – “in the multistorey car park with all the other homeless people”.
The landlords have been trying to evict him under section 21 for two years, during which time the case has been adjourned four times. He is here seeking a fifth six-month adjournment – but he has misgivings.
“Is it breathing space or is it pressure? It’s just pressure, because you can’t plan anything; you’re in limbo,” he says. He would like to leave his boiler-free flat, but unless he has been evicted he can’t bid for council homes or move to an emergency shelter. But he can’t afford to be evicted either – he has arrears from five years ago when he withheld rent to try to force his landlords to carry out repairs. If he is evicted with arrears, the council could refuse to rehouse him.
The hearing itself is a farce. The landlords don’t have a lawyer, and it shows. This hearing has a different judge – less stern, more jovial – but his patience is stretched as the eviction attempt is buried by errors. The eviction claim has a different tenancy start date from the actual tenancy agreement – sorting this out eats up the first 10 minutes. Then the judge points out the claimant has filed an electric installation report rather than an energy performance certificate.
To top it all off, the tenancy agreement lists the husband as the landlord, but the eviction claim has been made by his wife – who, as a result, has no right to bring the claim.
“Is there anything you would wish to say to that?” the increasingly exasperated judge asks her.
“No,” comes the defeated reply.
The judge throws out the claim. Robert has won on the sort of procedural grounds that are Camp’s go-to in section 21 cases – but in the event, she was silent throughout.
“I didn’t talk because I didn’t need to,” she tells Robert as they return to the makeshift office for a debrief.
“What this means is: it is done for now,” she says. “There is nothing stopping your landlords starting again, either using section 21 or using rent arrears. With these people, I don’t think it is done forever.”
“What we are doing is firefighting to the best of our ability,” Camp tells me once the day’s cases are finished. In that crammed morning, she was getting four or five minutes with each client before their hearing started. In the afternoon, things quietened down and she was able to spend nearly an hour on each case. For the clients, it’s the luck of the draw. “I think in the circumstances it’s as fair as we can make it. Whether it’s right, I don’t think it probably is. But it would need a massive investment in legal aid and structure to be able to do anything different.”
Legal aid has been one of austerity’s top targets. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (Laspo), which took effect in 2013, “devastated” the system, in the words of the Law Society. Laspo slashed funding for legal aid, leading to “deserts” around the country where no legal aid firms are operating. Law centres shut. Law firms closed their legal aid departments. The number of people having to go to court with no legal representation soared. According to the Law Society, 42% of people in England and Wales now have no access to a legal aid provider for housing advice.
The court system is under pressure. So is social housing stock, especially in and around London. “The position for the [council] homelessness teams is they have very challenging decisions to make,” Camp says. “It doesn’t excuse their behaviour at all, but there is a pressure on housing stock, and that leads people to making very harsh decisions.”
Such decisions are evident today. One couple were hit with section 21 after their landlord wanted to increase their rent by £400 a month. Unable to afford this, they tried to negotiate the rise down to £150 – at which point the landlord refused to extend their tenancy and gave them notice to leave.
“You will appreciate, Miss Camp,” the judge says. “Section 21: no-fault eviction. It’s not down to the defendants having done anything wrong, however they may feel.” He grants the eviction warrant.
They are a married couple, born abroad but both now British citizens, with four children aged between six and 10. One of the children is autistic and needs round-the-clock care.
The husband tells me he’d asked their council in London to try to rehouse them – only for them to offer him a place about 200 miles away in Preston.
If he refused the offer, he says, the woman from the council told him they would get social services involved as he would be making his children homeless on purpose. “I said: ‘What about my job?’ She said: ‘It’s just a retail job, and you can find it in Preston as well.’”
He was also offered a private flat in outer London. The landlord had turned a two-bedroom flat into a four-bedroom flat by the magic of squeezing more beds into small bedrooms. It was up a flight of stairs, which his autistic daughter struggles with. The rent was £1,800 a month.
“The depression you can see in my wife’s face. We keep forgetting things because it’s too much to take,” he says. “A £400 increase in one month – it’s not possible. If the mortgage rate has increased, that’s not down to me.”
Camp says the whole system is under immense stress – the dwindling number of legal aid lawyers, the courts, the councils, the housing associations and the housing stock.
“It’s a pressure cooker. And I don’t know how that release valve gets triggered, because I don’t think there is an obvious one,” she says.
A couple of days later, I get an email from Camp. The disabled woman in her 80s had been evicted at noon on the day of the hearing.
“[The bailiffs] came in and got her out and changed the locks. They said that they will keep her things for a short while, but it wasn’t clear to the family how long that would be. The son described it as truly horrific.
“They went to the council and the council had nothing that they could offer her for the night. She had to stay the night with relatives. They were due to go back there yesterday, but [the council] had already said that they could offer her somewhere – but it would be two hours away. Very obviously a long way away from the carers she has and the network of help that she needs.
“Welcome to housing, 2023 style.”
• The headline to this article was amended on 18 December 2023. An earlier version referred to “Britain’s” housing courts, when “England’s” was meant.
