Page 18 - Solving Housing Disputes

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to a system in which judges are ultimately required to adjudicate what are
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presented as single-issue disputes through an adversarial system. At the
same time, the underlying issues which are inherent to so many housing
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disputes remain unaddressed and cause significant pressures elsewhere.
Existing processes ultimately prevent the making of more meaningful
interventions in the underlying interests at issue in a dispute. In this Chapter,
we offer something new, inspired by models and approaches to dispute
resolution elsewhere in the justice system, at home and abroad.

2.8 Across the civil justice system, novel approaches to dispute resolution have
been tailored to the specific needs of users. As described in Chapter 3, in the
family law context, the Family Drug and Alcohol Court deploys a problem-
solving approach to investigate and address the underlying parental issues
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giving rise to the prospect of child removal. ADR has developed widely
across the justice landscape: mediation, online dispute resolution, early
neutral evaluation and ombudsmen schemes have moved the civil justice
system away from a system predicated exclusively on rights adjudication
through a formal court-based adjudicative process. A number of those
processes favour methods of dispute resolution that allow for ongoing
relationships between the parties to be sustained, rather than approaches that
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entrench conflict and adversarialism. There is also an emerging desire to use
digital processes to take better advantage of data in order to understand
systemic problems, with a view to joining up dispute resolution and regulatory
intervention to make earlier and targeted interventions in problem areas.

30 Notwithstanding the informal shift towards encouraging negotiated solutions.

31 The current adversarial system necessitates equality of arms but post-LASPO there has been a
fundamental failure to provide it as legal aid provision dwindles.

32 NAO research suggests that in 2015/16, local authorities spent £1.1 billion on homelessness, with £845
million attributable to expenditure on temporary accommodation, National Audit Office (2017)
Homelessness: A Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General. London: National Audit Office.

33 See para 3.52.

34 International research suggests that mediation produces greater compliance with decisions and lower
rates of re-litigation than adversarial methods of dispute resolution, ‘An International Evidence Review
of Mediation in Civil Justice’ (Social Research: Crime and Justice, Scottish Government, 2019) availab
le at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/international-evidence-review-mediation-civil-justice/pages/9/

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