Question
The ban on private landlords evicting tenants facing financial hardship because of the pandemic is likely to come to an end soon. Has WBC done any modelling of what the impact would be in terms of numbers of people the Borough would need to re-home in order to fulfil our statutory requirements to the homeless?
Minutes:
Question
The ban on private landlords evicting tenants facing financial hardship because of the pandemic is likely to come to an end soon. Has WBC done any modelling of what the impact would be in terms of numbers of people the Borough would need to re-home in order to fulfil our statutory requirements to the homeless?
Answer
The ban on evictions was extended to 20 September from when the courts were able to start considering claims made by landlords and the process towards eviction could start.
Although the ban has come to an end landlords now have to give their tenants a minimum 6 month notice period to leave their properties after an eviction notice is issued. However if there are serious mitigating factors, such as anti-social behaviour, fraud or domestic abuse then the notice period would be only 4 weeks (or in the case of domestic abuse 2 weeks). I am sure you would agree that if a woman is living with a man, or the other way round, you would not want them living together for more than 2 weeks.
During the Covid pandemic the team, our team, you have obviously been in the meeting today with TLIP, have continued to work with landlords and tenants to try and support both parties to resolve any issues threatening those tenancies and will continue to assist those who are at threat of homelessness as our statutory duty asks.
From our work with landlords and tenants over the past few months we are not aware of any significant number of pending eviction cases however the Homeless Reduction Act specialist will continue to monitor the situation and carry out some more detailed modelling in October.
That intelligence and modelling will be reported through to our multi-agency and cross-directorate, and will no doubt turn up and be spoken about at our Tenants’ meeting, the Local Homelessness Co-ordination Cell for consideration. That Group has overseen our successful approach to tackling rough sleepers and homelessness during the pandemic. Again, it was at the meeting today, I think when they did the last count. We had four people in the Borough who are homeless; which is probably what most Boroughs can only dream of.
Supplementary Question
It was pleasing to hear today that since we have been able to get Government funding in April we have managed to make some progress, particularly on rough sleepers. But, given where we are and the modelling that is being done to see how we can take this forward both short term and long term, I wondered what analysis is being done as part of that modelling, of the people who may be presenting as homeless as to whether there may be any groups that are particularly at risk of losing their homes or becoming rough sleepers? I am particularly, but not solely, thinking about this in the context of Black Lives Matter and whether we are actually looking at the ethnicity of people as well as disability, sexual orientation and so on, to check that there is not a problem anywhere in the system, or there is not something we could do better to help particular groups?
Supplementary Answer
My response to that Prue, is as you would expect, housing allocation is colour blind, and anyone who applies for a home is treated in the same way. If we were to find that there were an ethnic aspect to seeing disproportionate people from cultural backgrounds or ethnicity, we would actually have to start to record that. I think that is a very good idea and when I see Simon I will be asking if he can just make a point of making sure we are understanding this going forward.