Page 132 - Solving Housing Disputes

VIII. Annexure B: Dissenting report of the Housing
Law Practitioners Association members of the
Working Party

Introduction
1. This dissenting report addresses Chapter 2 of the Solving Housing Disputes
report, which proposes the establishment of a Housing Disputes Service
(HDS), before briefly addressing Chapter 4. It is produced by the members of
the Working Party from the Housing Law Practitioners’ Association (HLPA)
and is supported by Professor Helen Carr, another member of the Working
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Party.

2. In summary, we consider that the HDS is a fundamentally misconceived
proposition which is wrong in principle and unworkable in practice. To the
best of our knowledge, it is not supported by a single tenant/homeless persons
solicitors’ firm, organisation, charity, or law centre. It does not understand or
reflect the realities of representing vulnerable people with housing problems.
It fails to grapple with the inherent imbalance of power in the landlord/tenant
and local authority/homeless person relationship. It would, in our view,
breach Article 6 ECHR. It represents not a levelling of the playing field but
a race to the bottom.

Underlying principles
3. The principles underlying HLPA’s consideration of the HDS proposal are as
follows:

(a) The availability and adequacy of housing is of fundamental importance
to occupiers. Accordingly, any consideration of the HDS proposal must
start from the principle of non-retrogression in the protection of
occupiers’ rights: current inequalities between litigants must be “levelled
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up” rather than “levelled down”.

331 It draws upon views expressed to us by other members of HLPA, including by email, in person, and
at a meeting for HLPA members in December 2019 convened for the purposes of considering the HDS
proposal, at which opposition to the proposal was unanimous.

332 See Articles 2(1) and 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
General Comment No. 4: The Right to Adequate Housing and the UN OHCHR Factsheet 21 on The
Right to Adequate Housing.
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