The Supreme Court have ruled that evicting a woman from her council home for failing to pay her rent would breach her human rights. Judges felt that eviction was not a “proportionate” response.
It well and truly astounds me. Especially when the tenant owes £3,500 in rent arrears and is apparently in receipt of the equivalent of £15,000 in annual benefits.
The obvious question: what about the human rights of the landlord? We have seen many cases where landlords are facing repossession of their rental property due to tenants not paying their rent. Surely we have rights too, or did the honchos at the European Court of Human Rights forget that?
This ruling will open up the floodgates. I suspect that we will see a lot of tenants refusing to pay their rent, and then hiding behind human rights laws.
Many landlords that we speak with are unimpressed with this sort of tenant empowerment – especially when they are the ones who are losing out financially. Many will be demanding answers from stakeholders in Strasbourg and here in the UK – rightly so.
Put this judgement against the background of austerity. Taking on cases like this is not cheap. I am pretty certain that it is the taxpayer that has footed the bill for Hounslow Council to make this defence.
Whilst we can agree that it is fundamentally right to do so in this case, it wasn’t necessary – not for cases like this where it is plain and simple common sense tells us this lady should be evicted.
