Riots # 4 - The NCH Tenancy Agreement and Eviction

There has been a lot of political bluster by local politicians threatening fire and brimstone, in particular the threat of eviction for any council tenants found to be involved in the riots. Oh, and their parents, even though they may have had no idea what their kids were doing at the time and no reason to suspect they would be up to no good.

Some people have wondered whether this could actually happen so I've dug out what seems to be the latest NCH tenancy agreement. In addition I'm looking at this basic advice page* from Shelter.

The first stop is that if you are an introductory tenant, which the vast majority of council tenants will be for the first 12 months of their tenancy, you have pretty much diddley squat in terms of rights because you can be evicted without NCH having to demonstrate any grounds to do so.

Once you are a full secure tenant then the landlord does have to show grounds, although in many cases eviction isn't a foregone conclusion, a judge has to decide whether it is reasonable to evict you.

A key and often wide ranging ground is a breach of any term of the tenancy agreement. With the antisocial behaviour political juggarnaut having been steaming along for over a decade, tenancy agreements tend to have lots of things in them that could be applied to alleged rioters and their families. Scroll to para 3.12 (page 10) of the tenancy agreement for a read.

Para 1 makes it clear that NCH holds you responsible for anyone living at your home, any friends, visitors etc. So if the gas meter guy pops up and starts screaming racial abuse at the neighbours then theoretically...

In all seriousness, para 2 gets to the nitty gritty and forbids the tenant, others at the property etc causing a nuisance (ok, we expect that) or annoyance (what?) to anyone in Nottingham (whaaat!!!???).

There is more but as you can see there is enough there to catch anybody who is proven to have had any part in the riots.

As I say, proving a ground does not automatically mean you are evicted, the judge has to agree that it is reasonable. The key thing here then is to get advice and assistance asap if you find yourself in the middle of this shitstorm.

My own opinion is that dealing with crimes should normally be left for the criminal justice system and people should only lose their homes if they receive a prison sentence long enough to mean that their tenancy is no longer sustainable. Unfortunately, politicians are always looking for ways to look tough and they have an opportunity on a plate here. I suspect however that too much tough action against otherwise innocent family members will lead to a backlash, especially in Nottingham where the fairness of council house allocations has little credibility anyway.

*Note, don't take this article as legal advice, I've glossed over details and allsorts, my point is to demonstrate how the legal framework is well and truly in place for evictions of rioters and their families, although it isn't inevitable. If this happens to you, just make sure you get advice as soon as you can. You might want to try Notts Housing Advice as a first port of call or you can search for a solicitor here.

Riots # 3

One of the surprising things about the Nottingham Riots is that I haven't seen a single word of criticism about the way Notts police handled things. In fact everything I have read points to them dealing with matters pretty much as you would hope they would.

Also refreshingly we don't appear to have had any of the ridiculously over the top sentencing for what are often minor offences so far. A judge has thrown himself into the verbal attacks on those before him but you kind of expect that these days.

What a good job therefore that we can rely on fucking idiots like Jon Collins vigourously wanking themselves into a frenzy of frothy revenge fantasy in order to keep up appearances. This is the lying bastard who has done everything possible to protect the crooks who stole Nottingham's council houses as well as looting taxpayers' funds to pay his consultant mates £100,000s with no lawful authority*.

Stinking hypocrite, it's people like that who should be up in front of the beak.

*And Collins, if you're reading this, remember that if you sue me you'll have to produce the evidence that Tinworth was lawfully engaged which your officers have been unable to do so far. And we both know that the last thing you want is a court looking into the housing allocations scandal.

Riots and Hypocrisy Part 2

After my last post it occurred to me that I was concentrating entirely on the hypocrisy of the rich and powerful. It might be worth remembering that such double vision is rife among other social classes as well.

Over the last couple of days I've been talking to a former Nottingham resident in his mid 40s. He's been condemning the rioters in florid terms with a tasty bit of racism thrown in. Sending people back on the 'banana boat' was one of his solutions.

Thing is, this person used to work for Nottingham City Council's street cleansing department. He has repeatedly and proudly regaled me of all the things he'd nicked from the stores during his time there, in fact he's shown me a few of the goodies as well. He tells me that it's rife and tolerated by management, although this could simply be to try and claim some legitimacy for his actions.

Obviously I can't identify him and it's perhaps worth saying that he's not the sharpest tool in the box so it might be asking a bit much to expect him to see any connection between robbing taxpayers in this way and those who loot shops. Certainly he sees no problem with telling me, a Nottingham council tax payer in years past, about his escapades despite directly contributing to my taxes increasing.

Of course he's not alone. It quite likely is rife at NCC. I suspect if you challenged any of those doing it they would respond with tales of how management treat them badly (and if it were a worker in the Woolsthorpe depot they'd have a point), poor pay etc. These are valid issues. Looking wider how many of the rest of use are quite happy to justify our own casual lawbreaking? Speeding kills children but anybody caught is full of righteous indignation about how the police should concentrate on 'real criminals'. I've sat in pubs while blokes come in selling knock-off cigarettes which deprives the exchequer of much needed taxes. I've argued online on photography forums with a serving police officer justifying his use of overseas ebay sellers which falsely mark £1500 lens packages with 'no commercial value' in order to avoid import duties. This is a key selling point of these merchants, they even offer a guarantee that if you are clobbered with duties they will refund them, confident that Customs and Excise only have the resources to check a tiny minority of packages.

Think about the levels of hypocrisy on that last one. A publicly employed law enforcement official using a service which illegally deprives the UK government of taxes and helps to put UK companies out of business.

The fact is that society is riddled with 'respectable' crimes, crimes that aren't 'real crimes', crimes that 'don't really matter' and that we 'shouldn't worry about'. We're all guilty of it. Yet we all excuse it when it's us that do it.

Of course when it's 'them', 'over there', those who aren't 'one of us' it's different, out come the pitchforks. Some of the magistrates salivating over 'making an example' of the recent troublemakers would do well to subject themselves to close examination of their own lifestyles and bear them in mind before throwing away the key.

Riots

So we got riots in Nottingham too. We can still kick it with the big boys eh? We're still nationally relevant aren't we?

Obviously I'm being ridiculously obtuse for comic effect. Or it would be comic effect if it was actually funny. I ummed and ahhed about writing about any of this because I really wasn't sure if I had anything useful to say. Time will tell I suppose.

The thing I've been asking myself is why did riots occur in Nottingham? It's not like the entire country has been engulfed in civil disorder, it seems to have been confined to a few urban areas, London obviously, Manchester/Salford and Birmingham as far as I know saw significant problems, although there was some less serious trouble in Leicester. Why these and not, say, Leeds or anywhere in Scotland or Wales.

An easy answer of course is poverty. The Guardian made an interesting map of the London riots against deprivation and there certainly appears to be some visual correlation there. Nottingham does have areas which are very much at the upper lower worse end of deprivation indices. It's also probably not controversial to suggest a certain 'copycat' element  and of course, the reality is that individuals are making bad, selfish, destructive decisions about how to behave.

It's this latter element that the right wing tends to concentrate on in isolation whereas us lefties are duty bound to think about the first. I think there's more to it than that and it's important to remember that just because one explanation has merit doesn't mean that none of the others do. As a lefty I would never try to argue that a person in a hoody making his way into town and smashing his way into JDSports is entirely blameless and had no choice in what he was doing because it's poverty innit. Such a person is an individual and is capable of making his own decisions. However, context does, I believe have an impact in how often those decisions turn out to be bad but that context does not mean the individuals shouldn't be held to account.

Another crucial aspect of context is, I believe, the example set by authority. Again there is a certain amount of selectivity in how this is discussed by the right, concentrating almost exclusively on bad parenting, as if our parents are the only examples of behavioural standards in our lives. Of course this can be a factor and it's right to discuss that. But what is often forgotten, mainly because our politicians have an absolute vested interest in never acknowledging it in any way whatsoever, is the example set by those in power. I'm talking here about how politicians, police, judges, media bigwigs, councillors etc behave.

Things the British public have been expected to swallow uncomplainingly include MPs massively defrauding their expenses with only a tiny proportion held to account, bankers looting our financial system with barely a job lost, being bailed out by public funds and then going out and doing it again with bonuses back at boomtime levels. Meanwhile we're told that because of this bailout we have to endure years of austerity.

We have had to watch how the phone hacking scandal has unfolded after years of denial from the Metropolitan Police, now followed by numerous media figures arrested and a growing list of resignations and investigations into senior police officers.

Locally we have had to sit by as the Housing Allocations scandal has been covered up by local politicians who then feel able to threaten rioters (or their parents) with eviction*. There have been absolutely no evictions for illegally obtained council houses and one councillor publicly implicated was rewarded with a spell as Lord Mayor with the investigation into his behaviour strangely making no progress throughout his entire term of office and now extending way beyond the election. While our local police force appears to be dealing with the current disturbances well, they were entirely complicit in allowing NCC to cover up the housing scandal.

The Post has said the police are expecting an extra bill of £400k for the riots and this is clearly bad news but let's remember that they were happy to shell out £700k on a doomed and corrupt operation to stop a protest at Ratcliffe power station. A fine example to us all.

I understand of course that, just as we were all told by our teachers when we were very small, two wrongs don't make a right. But if you constantly see these powerful people constantly getting away with allsorts, while you can't get a council house and maybe got beaten up by the police at a demo recently, you may not feel as committed to the high minded principles of law and order and responsibilities for your actions as you once did. Multiply this up to a societal level and the chances of a breakdown of law and order is bound to increase as more people think 'why bother?'

So yes, of course those individuals have individual responsibility for their actions down at JDSports but our politicians and other people of power need to get their own houses in order and accept their responsibility for creating this context. I would at least then feel a bit more enthusiastic and supportive of the calls for condemnation that are being parrotted robotically by our politicians at the moment.

*Addendum - they have also issued calls for private landlords to evict people as well.