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Evicting the families of gang members from social housing is fraught with challenges
As a police commander calls for the eviction of parents of violent gang members, Matthew Bailes describes the ethical and practical challenges involved
I’m not exactly an avid reader of the Daily Mail.
However, I was intrigued when someone showed me an article in the paper recently, in which a police commander advocated the eviction of social housing tenants whose kids were involved in gang violence.
I am very much of the view that social housing landlords should take a hard-line on criminality and anti-social behaviour, not least because doing so can help protect the victims of bad behaviour – more often than not, other social tenants.
However, there are plenty of practical and ethical challenges with this particular idea.
The practical challenges start with actually securing an eviction.
“Social housing landlords should take a hard-line on criminality and anti-social behaviour.”
While it may be possible to hold tenants responsible for actions of other household members, the threshold for eviction is likely to be very high. A landlord would need to demonstrate that action was both reasonable and proportionate.
This would most likely entail demonstrating that the tenant had be given ample chance to engage with the relevant authorities, as well as the small matter of presenting enough evidence to persuade the court that, on the balance of probabilities, another member of the household was engaged in serious criminal activity.
Absent an existing criminal conviction, this would be far from straightforward, and it would almost certainly come at the end of a process which involved exploring other potential remedies, like the use of a civil injunction.
Given the time, complexity and risk with all of the above, it may well be that the threat of eviction is hard to back up in practice. That in turn creates a risk that the threat itself becomes less effective over time, and that the confidence of communities is lost in the process.
Even if an eviction did take place, there is a small matter of what happens next. As one of Paradigm’s anti-social behaviour experts put it, the Police might prefer to know where their usual suspects are rather than having them “in the wind”.
“It would be rough justice to evict a family that wants to do the right thing but is having trouble controlling one untoward teenager.”
The ethical dimension is also complex. If the parents of the alleged perpetrator simply refuse to engage, then perhaps we should have a little sympathy.
However, it would be rough justice to evict a family that wants to do the right thing but is having trouble controlling one untoward teenager.
There is plenty of scope for a grey area, and for the vulnerabilities of the tenant and/or other household members to become a factor.
So, perhaps unsurprisingly, my conclusion is that this proposal is not a panacea. Landlords may have a role in dealing with gang violence, but this will mean the careful use of a scalpel, not the application of a large sledgehammer – metaphorically, of course.
Like so many problems, this one is not quite as simple to solve as sections of the media might have us believe.
Matthew Bailes, chief executive, Paradigm Housing
