I have not, unfortunately, had chance to read Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment by Alison Ravetz, but I should be particularly interested to see how she feels that the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977 contributed to the decline in the status of council housing & council estates as home for the proud working classes.
This Act of Parliament, in part a (belated) response to the iconic BBC Wednesday Play, Cathy Come Home, in which a mother had her children taken into care after the family became homeless, laid an absolute duty on local authorities to provide accommodation for anybody who was homeless as defined by law, which almost certainly included any adult with a child.
Although there have been amendments to the law, & large numbers of individual cases decided by the courts, the fact remains that local authorities cannot simply wash their hands of the duty of providing a home for children who are not actually removed by some other court process.
Which is why, in part, authorities, even with their community safety teams, antisocial behaviour officers, acceptable behaviour contracts, safer neighbourhood teams, community support officers & even the police may be powerless to deal with determinedly anti-social families.
Even a civil court order for notice of repossession of their council house may be suspended by the court, as happened with the notoriously problematic family who (according to evidence being given to the inquest) tormented Fiona Pilkington for years until she committed suicide by setting her car on fire, while both she & her disabled daughter were inside it.
Qadir Abdullah (not his real name), an Iraqi Kurd, a former dentist who speaks five languages and works as a Home Office interpreter and a classroom assistant, had a similar experience, though the outcome was not so grim, for his family. After many complaints to the police & the authorities, their next door neighbours “left suddenly, accompanied by a fleet of council vehicles and police cars” a few days after two of the sons had carried out an horrific attack on two other young boys.
Michael Clark was a dangerous sex offender who went to live in Leeds when he completed a prison sentence, to be housed by the council, because, according to Councillor Les Carter, “We were told that we had a responsibility, a legal responsibility to house this person, because he’d finished his sentence and at that time we had a responsibility to house him because he wanted to come and live in Leeds and he claimed he had some connection with Leeds.”
So why was he put in a house near to where children were living? “I don’t know of any street in Leeds where there’s no children.”
Michael Clark then murdered a 14 year old girl who lived next door but one.
These are classic examples of the age old liberal dilemma - how to deal with people who behave in a very unliberal way. But they are also classic examples of how 'human rights', far from catching the imagination of the people (the voters), have led to the cynical view they bring reward only to people who behave badly while the authorities are powerless to protect the rest.
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