Page 12 - Solving Housing Disputes

1.4 The prospect of early legal advice and intervention to address housing problems,
homelessness and associated or underlying issues (such as benefits, family or
mental health issues) has been greatly attenuated by the cuts to civil legal aid
introduced by the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012
(LASPO). The funding cuts have caused large parts of the housing advice sector
to collapse, resulting in “advice deserts” across huge swathes of the country and
leaving many with nowhere to go when facing a housing problem. The
introduction of court closures to part-fund Her Majesty’s Court and Tribunal
Services (HMCTS) Reform Programme (Reform Programme) 11 has further
frustrated access to justice, reducing attendance rates of respondents because they
simply cannot afford to attend possession hearings outside their own towns.

1.5 While sources of advice have been reducing, ways in which disputes may be
resolved or problems solved have been proliferating. Alongside this, the housing
dispute resolution landscape suffers from disaggregation: there are just too many
places a person might go to resolve a dispute. There is a lack of coherence in
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regulatory application and oversight and a need for greater emphasis on early
resolution, conciliatory measures and ways to navigate the dispute resolution
system.

1.6 There have been several significant proposals for changes to regulation and
dispute resolution in housing in recent years, including:

11 The Reform Programme is predicated on the expanded use of technology and the development of
accessible digital court and tribunal processes to extend access to justice to those who have historically
been excluded, by virtue of legal cost, delay and complexity, from the justice system. Sale of the estate
has so far contributed more than 22% of the total cost of the Reform Programme, National Audit Office,
‘Transforming courts and tribunals – a progress update’, September 2019, para 2.1 available at https://
www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Early-progess-in-transforming-courts-and-tribunals.pdf

12 As discussed at length in Chapter 4, the bifurcation of housing disputes between court and tribunal
remains an issue. Further, the landscape for redress for complaints against housing providers is
disaggregated; the Property Redress Scheme, the Housing Ombudsman, the Local Government and
Social Care Ombudsmen the Property Ombudsman, the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, the Deposit Protection
Scheme and MyDeposits have distinct dispute resolution processes for disputes initiated by a tenant
against a landlord. See paragraph 4.1 below.

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