Squatting and the Tories
metamute - 27.09.2011 13:00
In the slipstream of a media campaign Tories are quickly gaining momentum for a new initiative to criminalise squatting in England and Wales. Andrea Tocchini sizes up the homelessness innovators and their opposition
Squat the Lot
Before working on this article, I thought that I was far too lazy to ever be a squatter. The amount of scoping out, teamwork and attention required to pick the right place and make it home for a reasonable amount of time would require a set of skills that are uncommon to most. On the other hand squatting also conjured a range of stereotypes that circulate unimpeded in mainstream culture. My general impression was that while in the rest of Europe squatting is mainly about political activism, in the UK it is largely comprised of people who don't want to pay rent. Squatters, I thought, were people who chose to live this way for lifestyle reasons associated with being artists, hippies, or radically chic. But, as I learned, the story is far more complex than that.
The proliferation of squatter stereotypes is partly due to its relative detachment from mainstream culture. This makes squatters an easy target for the right wing press and politicians alike. The media stereotyping and biased reporting of squatters seems to have escalated recently in curious synchronicity with the government's launch of a consultation on the criminalisation of squatting in England and Wales.
Consultation
It all started on 21 March 2011, with Housing Minister Grant Shapps declaring the government's intention to make squatting a criminal offence by early 2012. Announcing the consultation, the Minister also put forward a document produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice providing anti-squatting tips for home- and landowners, and comparing squatters, quite blatantly, with burglars.
Squat the Lot
Shapps justified the call for a consultation by claiming that there had been an increase in ‘public concern' over squatting, citing articles in The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Evening Standard as evidence. And in fact, in recent months the press has devoted a lot of space to condemning squatting as an anti-social and criminal practice, and to portraying squatters as binge-drinking, drug-taking yobs looking for expensive places to trash. This included an article series published by The Telegraph and The Daily Mail on a group of Latvian 20-somethings squatting a multi-million pound mansion in posh Highgate – note their suspicious eagerness to talk to the press about how soft the British legislation is on squatting, how much they love their respectable neighbourhood and enjoy their luxurious and free lifestyle. The Standard has also been quick to point out how the amendments to the current regulations are all part of Cameron's plan to tackle Broken Britain's crime problem. Squatting features alongside knife crime and gang culture in the list of antisocial behaviours the coalition wants to eradicate from society for all our benefit.
The criminalisation of squatting is an old Conservative objective (the last attempt was made in 1990, at the end of Thatcher's government), but this time it seems an untimely call at the very least. As cuts to welfare and social spending have proved an unpopular measure to counter a financial crisis caused by bankers, and social tensions loom in different parts of the country, such a reactionary programme could be quite dangerous.
With their rights being threatened, squatters decided to regroup and form their own clusters of resistance. The most active of these groups is the resurrected SQUASH (Squatters Actions for Secure Homes) campaign. They are preparing research material for the forthcoming parliamentary debate, and liaising with the media, politicians and homeless and housing charities to raise awareness and promote new collaborations.
‘It wouldn't make sense to organise all squatters,' says Paul Reynolds, a representative of SQUASH ‘as we're all so diverse, it'd take forever to agree on anything. Our aim is to carry on with our work, getting our arguments out to mainstream culture, and inspiring other groups to take action as well.'
Key to the success of the campaign is, according to SQUASH campaigners, a new media approach which hopes to change common perceptions of squatters in mainstream culture. Targeting such stereotyping, a territory previously left unchallenged, could present an opportunity to deconstruct bias and inject some new ideas about the perception of squatters.
Current Legislation
The SQUASH campaign has counter-arguments for all the main justifications of the government's plan. According to the campaigners, squatting does not constitute a threat to private properties because occupying a place that is not abandoned is already a criminal offence. Since immediate eviction is not really something they look forward to, the usual tactic is to find a property that is verifiably empty and abandoned. That does not include – as the Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS, a voluntary organisation providing support and legal aid for squatters) points out – houses left vacant for holidays, work related reasons, or second homes/holiday homes. As the ASS puts it:
Most of the media attacks have been based on a few cases where the owner of the property squatted claimed to have been living there before it was squatted. These claims appear to be untrue, though we don't have the resources to prove this, and have been used to create (once again) a myth of people's homes being threatened by squatters. ASS attempts to point out that squatters tend, sensibly, to go for properties where they can live for a reasonable amount of time, have fallen on deaf media ears.
In most cases the properties that are occupied do not belong to an individual, but rather to an organisation waiting for something to do with them, thus the suspicion that a tougher law will simply end up helping speculators rather than legitimate owners. The scaremongering here mainly serves the purpose of gaining consensus over a subject most people doesn't really worry about, or hardly have an opinion on. It is also a very British tradition, the first examples of which date back to as early as the 17th century, and whose protagonists ranged from artists to soldiers, political activists to miners.
Squatting is currently not illegal because, under English and Welsh law, unopposed trespassing is not a crime but a civil matter. And section six of the Criminal Justice Act, 1977, protects squatters from immediate eviction stating that it is illegal to break into a place when people within are opposing it. That includes landlords and police alike. As it stands right now, disputes of this kind have to be resolved in a civil court.
Campaign
The SQUASH campaign articulates a set of arguments which could potentially appeal to the wider political spectrum. It involves two lines of argument, one formulated to appeal to a more conservative audience, and the other with a distinctly more liberal touch. An important first point is the long-term effect the criminalisation of squatting will have on homeless people. Mainstream homeless charities such as Crisis and The Big Issue joined forces with SQUASH to argue that amendments to the law would place some of the most vulnerable people in even greater jeopardy. According to research published by Crisis, almost 40 percent of homeless people in the UK live in squats or have resorted to squatting to improve their situation. At a time in which jobs and benefits are disappearing, with councils cutting housing benefits and a lack of funding (and investment) for social housing, squatting could provide a popular solution for many. As ASS members point out:
People take over unused (sometimes misused) buildings and land, and house themselves, together. This would be resolving the (housing) crisis from our perspective; the other side seems to have their idea of resolving it, which isn't so person-friendly.
The government ‘solution' is also short on practicalities. To criminalise squatting without proposing an alternative affordable solution, it is to risk a surge of homeless people, or – should the consultation translate into law – an increase in ‘criminality'.
Which leads us to the deterrent functionality of criminalisation. Since people desperately need affordable housing and given that there are over a million vacant properties in England and Wales, people will either try to squat anyway, or will have to find alternative solutions on the cheap. SQUASH warns against what has been seen by many commentators as the primary alternative to squatting: the so called ‘guardian agencies' such as Camelot. Popular in the Netherlands, in some cases these agencies offer selected individuals the possibility of living without paying rent in vacant properties waiting for development. The norm however is payment of a monthly license fee consisting of low (but now rising) rent. The occupiers are not tenants, but guardians, which means they might have to abide by a series of rules which vary with each company. These rules include providing a guarantee of presence at certain times, not leaving the premises for more than three days at a time, not having tenancy rights such as privacy – anyone the guardian agency or the landlord permits can walk in at any time – or security, for the length of the agreement.
Camelot-Scamelot
With funding for social housing further reduced and squatters facing criminalisation, it seems that there is something missing from the possible alternatives already at work. ‘The risk is a two-way system, in which those who can afford to rent a house will have tenancy rights, and those who can't, ending up with no rights at all', says SQUASH's Paul Reynolds.
Similarly, a second argument of the campaign is that the criminalisation will effectively empower and prioritise landlords and speculators over tenants. As squatters' rights are based on tenants' rights, eviction of vulnerable tenants (i.e. paying tenants without a contract) could become easier for dubious landlords. Say you pay rent but don't hold a regular tenancy agreement, the landlord would only have to claim that you are squatting the property to force your immediate eviction – a possible criminal court case might follow.
Thirdly, the cost of law enforcement – policing, evictions, court cases – will be substantial, and have an effect on social housing and local authorities as well, which makes it at the very least impractical. At a time in which police forces are being shrunk, services reduced and local councils are unable to afford investments in social housing or care, a more or less functioning micro-system is being shifted into the realm of illegality, with the subsequent consequences for law enforcement and provision of alternative accommodation. All this can only serve to increase public spending. From a purely economic viewpoint, squatting is much more sustainable than what it will cost to get rid of it.
Aimed towards the other end of the political spectrum, the fourth argument that SQUASH puts forward is that the new legislation will have an impact on the right to protest. If trespassing is made a criminal offence, the occupation of buildings for the purpose of protest and dissent – as with recent demonstrations against tuition fees increases and welfare cuts – might incur a criminal record. Government statements seem to indicate that the path they are pursuing is one of creating closer association between trespassing and squatting with the criminal offences of criminal damage and burglary.
Ultimately, SQUASH is keen to point out the pivotal role of squatting in the development of art and culture in the UK, given the number of artists, musicians, writers and whoever else chooses this particular lifestyle as a way of sustaining their activity.
Squatters
Squatters make up a diverse community. There is no homogeneous agenda behind someone's decision to squat, and as ASS reports from their experience as an advisory service, all sorts of backgrounds and experiences are represented within this particular group. Whilst some are keen to associate themselves with a lifestyle choice, or rather consider squatting on element in making a particular lifestyle sustainable, for others it is a matter of economic necessity. The biased language with which the government (and even the sympathetic press) assess the issues misses the diverse composition of squatting communities, in its haste to annexe the latter to the boiling pot of hooded crooks being readied for sacrifice in order to rectify Broken Britain.
As ASS members point out,
"few squatters are explicitly making a statement against private property and those who are will probably be involved in political and social projects as well as squatting for their own living space. But implicitly, squatting is a practical statement against private property, at least against its ‘abuses': properties left empty, extortionate rents, and insecure tenancies."
Futures
But at a time when the dismantling of the welfare system and the high rates of unemployment are putting livelihoods in jeopardy throughout the country, squatting is also a statement against a politics that seems to endorse a two speed society. With the gap between rich and poor widening, the criminalisation of squatting contributes to a general regulation of the boundaries of poverty, with armed guards patrolling its gates. It is the ideological side of the government's agenda that seemingly wants to affect the personal freedom of individuals, whom, in order to survive on the rightful side of the law, are meant to take any job that is available – never mind vocation, aspirations – in order to afford to live in an overpriced hutch.
The bulldozing through of such legislation at a time in which the streets of the UK have been rocked by social unrest – sometimes organised, as with many of the anti-cuts protests, and sometimes as an explosion of uncontrolled violence such as the often individualistic kung-fu shopping of last month's riots – can only worsen the situation. At a time in which the State is not able to afford the services it is expected to provide, to be investing in the toughening up of policies whose value could only be sensationalist at best sounds about as reasonable as the repossession of council houses and benefits cuts for those directly involved in the riots, or even those related to them.
The funniest bit of the story is, it is probable that not even the government itself believes all of this is actually worth going through with. With no alternative solutions provided and the likely increase of homelessness and, most crucially, vulnerable tenancies, ‘people will just squat, anyway', as a mature squatter put it. And with the practicalities of law enforcement in question – the lack of resources for policing, the housing crisis, the lack of information on the number of squatters and where they live, and the actual difficulty of retrieving this data – the project seems to have an extremely short shelf-life. What it does do though is signal the direction the government is taking in response to the crisis. Now we're in trouble – they seem to be telling us – people who aren't rich and able to sort themselves out shouldn't expect much sympathy. They should take any basic job that will allow them (only just) to rent a flat at a questionable price, and go on with their lives without causing ‘us' any trouble. That is market economy. Short-minded as this might be, the side-effects (read infringements on civil liberties) are potentially overwhelming. Life under the Tories... Bit scary.
Andrea Tocchini is a freelance writer. He is seriously considering taking up squatting
Info
Ministry of Justice, Options for dealing with squatters, (Closing date: 05 October 2011)
 http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/dealing-with-squatters.htm
SQUASH (Squatters Actions for Secure Homes) campaign
http://www.squashcampaign.org/
ASS (Advisory Service for Squatters)
http://www.squatter.org.uk/
 Website: http://www.metamute.org/en/articles/squatting_and_the_tories_a_story
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