Homelessness Under the Housing Act 1996, local authorities have a duty to provide accommodation to people who are judged to be ‘homeless’ and have a ‘priority need’ for accommodation (if they have children living with them, or elderly or disabled people). If a person is homeless and has a priority need, then the local authority can avoid its duty to provide accommodation only by showing either that he or she has a ‘local connection’ with another local authority’s area that is stronger than the connection with theirs, or that the person is ‘intentionally homeless’ (for example, he or she was in housing or on a legal site, perhaps even some time ago, but left this legal accommodation for no good reason, or for a reason which was the fault of that person or a family member). Housing departments should consider the needs of applicants for housing and, as far as is possible, provide them with ‘suitable’ accommodation. Providing ‘suitable’ accommodation may include providing a pitch on a public site; however this is discretionary and, in areas where there are no pitches available, Gypsies and Travellers will invariably be offered conventional housing. In R v Carmarthenshire County Council ex parte Price (2003) Mrs Price had made an application to the local authority for homeless persons accommodation in the form of a pitch because she had no lawful place where she could station her caravans. After considering the matter, the local authority offered Mrs Price a house and sought to evict her family from an unauthorised site that it owned. The High Court quashed the local authority’s decision to evict Mrs Price and her family. Central to Mrs Price’s case was the question of her ‘cultural aversion to conventional housing’. Newman J decided that the local authority had erred when considering the respect that should be paid to Mrs Price’s Irish Traveller lifestyle, in that it had given too much weight to the fact that she had been prepared to live in conventional housing in 2001 and had then used that fact to justify disregarding her traditional lifestyle when it considered her request for culturally appropriate accommodation. The judge also decided that if the local authority had decided that Mrs Price’s commitment to her traditional lifestyle was so powerful as to present great difficulty in her living in conventional housing, the authority had no duty to find her an authorised pitch or site but her commitment to her lifestyle was a significant factor in considering the extent to which the authority had to facilitate her traditional way of life. It follows that when a local authority receives a homeless application from a Gypsy or Traveller it must assess the Gypsy’s or Traveller’s aversion to conventional housing and then see whether it can ‘facilitate the Gypsy way of life’. Facilitating a Gypsy or Traveller lifestyle should involve a serious and extensive consideration of sites in the area (not just land owned by the local authority in question). In fact local authorities should carry out such an assessment whether or not they receive homelessness applications from Gypsies and Travellers - in order to comply with their duties to produce homelessness strategies and reviews every five years. In September 2006, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) published the long-awaited re-issue of the Homelessness Code of Guidance for Local Authorities (the piece of the previous Code that referred to Gypsies and Travellers had been criticised in the case of Codona v Mid-Bedfordshire DC – see further below for a discussion of this case). With regard to Gypsies and Travellers, it is stated: ‘Where a duty to secure accommodation [for a Gypsy or Traveller] arises but an appropriate site is not immediately available, the housing authority may need to provide an alternative temporary solution until a suitable site or some other suitable option, becomes available. Some Gypsies and Travellers may have a cultural aversion to the prospect of ‘bricks and mortar’ accommodation. In such cases, the authority should seek to provide an alternative solution’ (paragraph 16.38). In Codona, the Court of Appeal approved the decision in the Price case. Leanne Codona had applied to the district council under the homelessness legislation for a site or a piece of land where her family would be authorised to stay. It was accepted that the family had a very high degree of aversion to conventional housing. In response to the homelessness application, as an interim measure, the local authority offered the family bed and breakfast accommodation. Ms Codona appealed this offer on grounds of suitability. The Court of Appeal indicated that the following matters were relevant considerations for a local authority to take into account when assessing a Gypsy or a Traveller’s refusal of an offer of conventional housing, namely: (i) whether the applicant and, if relevant, his or her family, lived in a caravan or caravans; (ii) whether they were Romany or subscribe to Gypsy culture; (iii) whether they were nomadic for a substantial part of the year; (iv) whether the nomadism was linked with their livelihood; (v) whether they subscribe to the relevant features of the Gypsy way of life, such as an aversion to conventional housing. With regard to (iii) and (iv) above, regard should now be had to the new definition of ‘Gypsy’ for planning purposes which means that Gypsies and Travellers can, in certain circumstances, retain their ‘Gypsy status’, even though they have stopped travelling either temporarily or permanently (see Planning permission for caravan sites above). However, it should be noted that in the Codona case, the local authority did no more than consider the availability on pitches on sites that already had permission (all of which were full) before deciding to offer the family bed and breakfast accommodation. When deciding that the local authority had acted reasonably in the circumstances of the case, Auld LJ stated:- ‘[T]his was a case in which the council was required as a matter of relative urgency to find accommodation for an extended family occupying some 6 or 7 caravans, who are insisting, because of their aversion to conventional housing, on being provided an alternative site for all of their caravans on which they could continue to live together. Despite careful enquiries by the council, it could find no such sites. Nor could it provide at such notice long-term conventional bricks and mortar housing…It was driven, therefore, as a short-term measure, to offer short-term accommodation of a bed and breakfast nature. In doing so, it was clearly acting as a matter of last resort and with the clear understanding that the duration of their stay in such accommodation was to be kept as short as possible.’ Chat conversation end
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 12:02:17 +0000