The Metropolis

Proof, schmoof. Wandsworth starts evicting people accused of being rioters

Josh Hall | Friday 12 August, 2011 16:49

This afternoon Wandsworth became the first Council to serve a post-riot eviction notice.

The south-west London Council grabbed this dubious accolade after beginning an eviction process against a tenant whose son was involved in Monday night’s events.

Read that again. There is no suggestion that the tenant who has been served with the notice was involved in any criminal behaviour. It was his or her son that was rioting.

Council tenancies provide local authorities with the power to evict those who fail to abide by certain conditions. Wandsworth Council told me tenants are provided with a whole list of do’s and don’t’s [PDF] when they first move in. Further restrictions are contained in the Housing Acts of 1985 and 1988, which provide for eviction of those who are “guilty of conduct causing or likely to cause a nuisance or annoyance to a person residing, visiting or otherwise engaging in lawful activity in the locality.”

The Acts also allow Councils to kick out tenants in the event that they allow their property to be used for “immoral” purposes – but the breathtaking iniquity of that particular clause is probably best left for another day.

Wandsworth told me that the eviction of tenants on the grounds of criminal behaviour is a “fairly regular” occurrence, but they were unable to provide figures. A press officer said the number of cases of this sort were likely to be, at most, in “single digits a year.”

One wonders what those unlucky few did to deserve homelessness.

There are a few points here, all of which seem so blindingly obvious that it really is astonishing Wandsworth has missed them. To begin with: the Council has apparently heralded the beginning of a new era in which it is acceptable for government to make homeless the families of those charged with crimes. Second: they have just, at a stroke, potentially consigned at least two people to the streets. Third: the situation is only going to get worse, as they have indicated to me that this is “undoubtedly not going to be the last” case of its kind.

The criminal justice system is there to punish criminals. The separation of the judiciary and the executive is supposed, amongst other things, to avoid the potential for vindictive extra-judicial punishment of this sort.

Consider how far we have shifted over the course of the past 24 hours; how much we have already lost. Yesterday the Prime Minister (a man who has admitted to vandalism and criminal damage in his youth) announced new powers to force people to uncover their faces, and new powers to disperse crowds. There is serious talk of social media blackouts of the kind favoured by Middle Eastern autocracies. And now: news that we live in a country that will respond to the anger spilling over in its inner cities not with reflection or consideration, but by robbing the families of rioters of their homes.

This is an unfathomably stupid, breathtakingly spiteful act.

Follow this writer at @JoshAJHall

---