As the housing crisis grows worse, the need for good legal advice to help solve people’s problems is stronger than ever. LAG’s Housing Law Conference, held in partnership with Garden Court Chambers on 16 June 2023, explored viable solutions with lawyers, caseworkers and other housing experts, and guest speakers gave presentations on their research, work experience or advocacy on issues that affect thousands of people across the country.

The conference kicked off with an insider’s look at the Museum of Homelessness Dying Homeless Project, which commemorates and records data on over 5,000 homeless people who have died since 2017. Research and campaigns coordinator Miranda Keast explained that the museum has a dedicated memorial to honour the dead as well as a death café – a safe space for grieving family members to talk openly about the people they’ve lost. ‘People are dying,’ she said. ‘We know that people are being lost from our community and that’s a super important thing. Data is important in aiming for change and it’s those things that will help change minds and make a case for change in different ways.’

This was followed by a session on unlawful eviction with a panel consisting of Ben Reeve-Lewis, a co-founder of Safer Renting, Daniel Clarke of Doughty Street Chambers and Gus Silverman, a solicitor at Irwin Mitchell. Reeve-Lewis started the presentation by discussing unlawful evictions involving excessive harassment. He talked about brutal eviction cases, including one where a tenant was chased out by a landlord with a chainsaw. Reeve-Lewis explained that although cases like that should be tried in the criminal court, anything involving eviction seems to go to the civil court by default.

Next, a panel comprising Saskia O’Hara and Alexandra Goldenberg of the Public Interest Law Centre and Jeremy Ogilvie-Harris then of Southwark Law Centre discussed the growing problem of gentrification and how working-class communities are disproportionately losing their homes because of it. They presented data and research findings on gentrification, as well as legal advice that may be given to people affected by planning and development in their area. O’Hara and Goldenberg spoke about their organisation’s Gentrification Project, which gives legal aid, media assistance, and education on legal terminology to people who fall victim to eviction from large redevelopment areas or are forced to move out due to increasing rent and utility costs.

‘The prospects for safe, affordable housing for working-class people in this country are really bleak,’ O’Hara said. ‘Tens of thousands of families have left inner London. This is social cleansing on a vast scale, leaving large parts of the city to be preserved for the rich.’

After lunch, housing journalist and author of Tenants, Vicky Spratt, spoke in a recording about the desperate need for housing legal aid after the cuts under the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Spratt said that legal challenges related to housing have severely declined, despite repossessions and evictions being at record high numbers. 'Advice deserts' throughout the country have very few lawyers who can provide legal aid in housing cases.

'Just yesterday I was speaking to a mother of two who was evicted in Woolwich and has been moved into a Travelodge in Croydon. She's commuting two hours every day to take her son to school,' Spratt said. 'It's absolutely wild out there and something has got to give.'

The next session of the afternoon focused on housing conditions. Catherine O’Donnell of Garden Court Chambers and Giles Peaker, a partner at Anthony Gold, presented data on how over 2m tenants in the UK live in homes in a state of disrepair and have families who suffer excessive cold in the winter. Many are dying from unsafe living conditions: two-year-old Awaab Ishak died in December 2020 from a respiratory disease caused by excessive exposure to mould in his home. ‘It actually took a child to die before terrible housing conditions actually became a matter of public focus,’ Peaker said.

Next up was a panel that gave an overview on discrimination in housing. Alice Irving, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, David Renton of Garden Court Chambers and Ben Clay, a housing activist from the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, went over the different provisions of the Equality Act 2010 that can be used in cases of housing discrimination. This was followed by a session in which Tony Martin, head of legal clinics at BPP University, gave a practical guide to rent repayment orders, including the grounds on which a tenant is eligible to file one.

Rounding off the conference, Nick Bano of Garden Court Chambers gave an overview of the Renters (Reform) Bill. The bill, introduced on 17 May 2023, will finally remove Housing Act 1988 s21, putting an end to no-fault evictions, and will give more rights to tenants to fight back against unreasonable rises in rent (or ‘backdoor evictions’).