Yesterday, James Munby – President of the Family Division – announced that the Ministry of Justice is planning a study surrounding the cross examination of vulnerable witnesses by LIPs.
You can read more about it:
and
D. Rosen at London-based Darlington Solicitors just published a post titled Perceptions and Expectations of Litigants in Person (‘LIPS’): A commercial Litigator’s perspective on the firm’s blog.
Stressed litigant in person making a phone call
“During my career I have met many wonderful and varied LIPS.”, he or she writes.
“I am frustrated at seeing too many good people waste their lives pursuing their perception of truth and justice, because a Court has not agreed with them.”
I agree.
You have to know when to pursue a matter and when to let it go. A good way to decide can be to ask yourself whether other people – society – might benefit from it if you continue to pursue the matter.
Go read this post – here – because this solicitor makes very good points.
‘Revenge porn’ criminalised: What is it and what are the consequences? was one of yesterday’s headlines in the news.
Revenge porn is commonly used by internet trolls. California was among the first states that made it a crime. Many other forms of trolling are not a crime, or not a crime yet.
If you are a target of internet trolls and they are doing damage to your life, there are all sorts of things that you can do, in spite of how difficult it may seem. I will explain more about that in due course.
This morning, I had an e-mail from Citizens Advice of which the first line said that the House of Lords voted to put a stop to retaliatory evictions yesterday.
I was very busy with something else yesterday and this morning’s media had nothing on the topic so I did a web search. On Letting Agent Today, I found that indeed, apparently, the House of Lords essentially wants to make it impossible for landlords to evict a tenant for no reason within six months after a tenant’s improvement or hazard awareness notice.
It concerns amendments to the Deregulation Bill.
Last year, the National Audit Office published a report titled ‘Implementing Reforms to Civil Legal Aid’, a report by the Comptroller and Auditor of the General Ministry of Justice and Legal Aid Agency.
Last week, the Bar Council responded to it. Chairman of the Bar Alistair MacDonald QC said:
‘Overall, the report reflects the Bar Council’s concerns that the scale of the cuts made to legal aid, and the way they were introduced, abandoned the most vulnerable, created disorder in our courts, and damaged our legal advice services.’
You can read the rest of the response: here.
Wrong.
Cyber crime is much sneakier than most people think. It is not limited to someone accessing your hotmail or Facebook account. it can take over your life. And gobble up your business.
There are various ways to access a computer that is offline. A term sometimes used for an offline computer is ‘air-gapped’, but for starters, a true air-gapped computer should never ever have been connected to the internet to minimise the chance that there is any software (code) on it that shouldn’t be on it. It should be brand-new, out of the box.
Unless you put it in a Faraday cage, some of the information on an offline computer can still be accessed although this is usually merely passive. It concerns information displayed on a screen or entered on a keyboard, for example. This can be accessed but not altered.
Here are a few technical articles for those who want some background:
Here is a really nice old video about it:
And this one, in German and much more recent, is quite clear too:
Here is another one:
In addition to the above, I see at least four more or less regular ways to access a computer and tamper with it:
– via cable or telephone line, directly;
– via cable or telephone line, using unused capacity on the line;
– wireless/wifi network;
– powerline networking.
In the case of powerline networking, there may be a need for that computer to have been hacked before it was taken offline. That also seems to be the case for at least one of the air-gap hopping methods.
It may also be possible to access printer memory via powerline networking and acquire information that way.
A computer does not have to be accessed through its operating system such as Windows, as is often thought. Computers can be accessed at a much more basic level as well, but it depends on the hardware and its settings.
Hackers can also purchase or build scanning equipment that can detect your mobile equipment. Phone hacking and spying software is available from regular retailers and its use has ‘reached epidemic proportions‘ (article in the Independent).
Here are four more articles, in The Independent and the Huffington Post:
If you are really intrigued now, read this article in NewScientist about new bugging devices.
This Friday, on the 23rd of January, I plan to be at Barclays in Commercial Road in Portsmouth. You can find me there at a table, around lunchtime. I will be there on Saturday the 24th as well.
Last month, the Court of Appeal dealt with the case between Nata Lee Ltd and Abid & Another. Nata Lee appealed against an Order made in the Central London County Court in 2013.
Nata Lee had appeared in the County Court without legal representation and had failed to apply for permission to include an expert witness in a timely manner (three days late). The County Court judge subsequently refused to admit this witness.
Although other factors played a greater role in this case, in its judgement ([2014] EWCA Civ 1652), the Court of Appeal made clear that, in its view, the fact that a party is acting without legal representation is no reason to allow disregard for rules, orders and directions.
Litigants in person should not be surprised by the consequences of failing to comply with the CPR or by having applications for relief from sanctions turned down when these sanctions were the result of failure to comply with the CPR on the part of the litigant in person.
Lord Justice Briggs continued:
“There may be cases in which the fact that a party is a litigant in person has some consequence in the determination of applications for relief from sanctions, but this is likely to operate at the margins.”
You certainly find that among Britain’s (street-) homeless.
Today is the third of three days at the Supreme Court that focus on homelessness, housing duty and vulnerability (or rather, priority).
The three cases are:
– Hotak (Appellant) v London Borough of Southwark (Respondent)
– Johnson (Appellant) v Solihull MBC (Respondent)
– Kanu (AP) (Appellant) v London Borough of Southwark (Respondent)
(Interveners in all three cases:
Equality and Human Rights Commission, Shelter, Crisis and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.)
What is it all about? Predominantly 189(1)(c) in the Housing Act 1996:
189 Priority need for accommodation.
(1) The following have a priority need for accommodation—
(a) a pregnant woman or a person with whom she resides or might reasonably be expected to reside;
(b) a person with whom dependent children reside or might reasonably be expected to reside;
(c) a person who is vulnerable as a result of old age, mental illness or handicap or physical disability or other special reason, or with whom such a person resides or might reasonably be expected to reside;
(d )a person who is homeless or threatened with homelessness as a result of an emergency such as flood, fire or other disaster.
(2) The Secretary of State may by order—
(a) specify further descriptions of persons as having a priority need for accommodation, and
(b) amend or repeal any part of subsection (1).
(3) Before making such an order the Secretary of State shall consult such associations representing relevant authorities, and such other persons, as he considers appropriate.
(4) No such order shall be made unless a draft of it has been approved by resolution of each House of Parliament.
Hotak is a pretty straightforward case, at first sight; the two other cases are less clear. Hotak concerns two brothers, one of which (Sifatullah) would certainly be considered vulnerable if the other one (Ezatullah) had not said that he would look after his brother. The brothers were living in a friend’s flat in Southwark, but told to leave because of overcrowding. Ezatullah’s immigration status at the time, however, made him ineligible for housing assistance.
Southwark did give the brothers temporary housing while it made its mind up. It decided that Sifatullah was unintentionally homeless, and eligible for assistance, yet did not consider him vulnerable in terms of in priority need of housing because his brother was looking after him. This is where the case went off the rails.
If Sifatullah were a pregnant woman, unintentionally homeless (as it is called), and eligible for assistance, whether the person with whom she resides or might reasonably be expected to reside supports her or not makes no difference, as one of the lawyers highlighted on Monday.
Another one pointed out that the law does not contain an element of comparison. A person’s own condition makes him or her relatively vulnerable when on the street, and the law had the intention of preventing and eliminating all homelessness. This would mean that a) there is no such thing as “an ordinary street-homeless person” (used by Southwark to compare Sifatullah against) and b) one could say that being homeless in itself already points toward a person being less able to fend for himself or herself, as homelessness is not the norm in this country.
It looks like the practice of the application of this legislation – carried out by the decision-making housing officer – has been moving toward comparing a blind applicant with street-homeless blind applicants, deaf applicants with street-homeless deaf applicants, mentally ill applicants with street-homeless mentally ill applicants, applicants with substance abuse with homeless people with substance abuse.
More specifically, practice seems to be more and more relying on the premise that all homeless persons are, almost by definition, street-homeless mentally ill and/or substance abusers and/or physically ill, deserving no special protection (in Johnson, for instance). The law was not intended that way. The law does not even say anything like this.
The pregnant woman, however, is never compared with other pregnant women to determine her vulnerability. The same applies to any persons who have lost their home in a flood.
“Ideas about vulnerability are perhaps most often applied by those in more powerful positions to define those in less powerful ones.” (Kate Brown)
UPDATE 10 December from Lime Legal (edited by Jan Luba QC):
“After the talking-out of the Tenancies Reform Bill, there is to be an attempt to introduce the same provisions controlling retaliatory eviction as part of the Deregulation Bill which is currently going through the House of Lords”
Today in Court 2:
Aster Communities Limited (formerly Flourish Homes Limited) (Respondent) v Akerman-Livingstone (AP) (Appellant)
Not broadcast live.
A clear case of a causal relationship between someone’s disability and the reason for issuing proceedings, in my view. Someone unable to comply with what is expected from him. (One could see it as maladministration, perhaps.)
Will the Supreme Court see a violation of the Equality Act and let this weigh heavier or will other interests overrule?
Not an easy case.
Update: still went live later.
PS
See also my earlier post about this case.
A little while ago, I posted about the upcoming vote on the Tenancies (Reform) Bill. Its intention is to put a stop to revenge evictions.
First, I received an update from Crisis (the national charity for single homeless people), informing me that “despite hundreds of Crisis campaigners like you emailing their MP, the Bill to tackle revenge evictions has failed.”
A few days later, I received a letter from the MP for Portsmouth South, Mike Hancock. He explained in detail that two Conservative MPs “intentionally used up the rest of the allotted time to prevent the Bill from being voted on“.
At around the same time, I also received Lime Legal’s newsletter (edited by housing champion Jan Luba QC), which included an item on the same topic:
“On 28 November 2014 a private members bill designed to address retaliatory evictions … was talked-out in Parliament and, despite having had UK Government support, is unlikely to make further progress.”
Also interesting is what the Residential Landlord’s Association had to say about what actually happened. Among other things, it wrote:
“The Bill ran out of time, after only 60 MPs voted on a procedural motion to put the Bill to a vote. 100 MPs are required for such a motion to succeed. It now drops to the bottom of the order for Private Members’ Bills and has no chance of proceeding.”
If you clicked on that last link, you’ll have seen that someone called the Bill “badly drafted“.
Together, these four views give a better picture than either one of them individually, particularly when combined with the official account of what went on that day.
More information:
The second reading debate is expected to continue on 23 January 2015. Initially, that appears to have been scheduled for 5 December 2014 (tomorrow), a day on which there would likely have been no time to discuss the Bill in Parliament as there would be 8 bills ahead of it, so I understood from Mr Hancock’s explanation. It is even less likely to be read on 23 January, as 11 bills will be ahead of it on that day, and everyone agrees that is it dead in the water.
If you want to follow what happens to the bill, click on this link to its page on the Parliament’s web site.
UPDATE 10 December from Lime Legal:
“After the talking-out of the Tenancies Reform Bill, there is to be an attempt to introduce the same provisions controlling retaliatory eviction as part of the Deregulation Bill which is currently going through the House of Lords”
You can follow the current proceedings online: here.
There has been a “massive bonfire” (words of counsel) in the National Domestic Extremism Database recently, partly or perhaps mainly because of the HMIC’s assessment that there was massive overinclusion of data.
The existence of this database was revealed by the media (The Guardian, I believe) in 2009. It may have been in existence since 1999 and have widened its scope later.
Being a police officer can’t be easy these days. My previous post may have sounded pretty harsh to some, but I have had this present post in the works for some time too. Obviously, police officers get to see a lot of bad stuff that most humans could happily do without, but that’s only the beginning.
When I look at police, I always have in my mind the distant memory of when the hotshots of Dutch police got together during several weekends, taking a good look at what was going on in their forces. ( I seem to remember that they did that in their spare time, unpaid.) Then they started to do away with a lot of crazy stuff that was handed down to them by the Ministry without there being any basis in reality for it.
What follows is not an in-depth analysis of what is going on in England & Wales, but a low-resolution snapshot taken from some distance, a bird’s eye perspective. It reveals an interesting landscape. Continue reading
Today brings the start of three days of policing matters at the Supreme Court:
Both cases concern the right to the protection of citizens’ privacy, notably regarding the length of the time certain matters remain part of police records.
The first case looks at whether the retention by police of data relating to an individual’s involvement in one or more protests was lawful in terms of art.8 ECHR.
The second case is a judicial review on whether the retention by police of information relating to a letter issued to the respondent following an allegation of harassment was lawful in terms of art.8 ECHR.
Police and CPS like soft targets. (I call it sandwich justice, but sometimes, it goes a lot further than mere sandwich justice.) Thankfully, she was not jailed for 12 months.
Readers, howmany more similar stories am I going to have to cover?
A woman whose benefits had been stopped stole food from a supermarket.
Wendy Rogers, 51, of Garstang Road East, Poulton, pleaded guilty to two offences of theft.
Chrissie Hunt, prosecuting, said Rogers took a shoulder of pork from Asda on September 28, and the following day returned to the store and took a packet of cream cheese.
Trevor Colebourne, defending, said his client, who had no previous convictions, was severely disabled and had had numerous operations.
At the time of the theft she had problems over her benefits and was penniless.
Rogers was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £15 victims’ surcharge by Blackpool magistrates.
On 28 November, MPs can vote to outlaw revenge evictions, evictions that happen just because a tenant asks to have the heating fixed or a mould and moisture problem dealt with. The law currently still allows that. Find out if your MP is standing up for renters. Mine is (but I don’t know yet if he will also attend the debate in Parliament that day).
Here are examples of other MPs who are voting to end revenge evictions:
Andrew Smith
Oxford East
Bob Blackman
Harrow East
Nicola Blackwood
Oxford West and Abingdon
Peter Bottomley
Worthing West
Philip Hollobone
Kettering
Sarah Teather
Brent Central
Stephen Williams
Bristol West
Tessa Munt
Wells
Andrew Slaughter
Hammersmith
Annette Brooke
Mid Dorset and North Poole
Caroline Lucas
Brighton Pavilion
David Lammy
Tottenham
Diane Abbott
Hackney North and Stoke Newington
Don Foster
Bath
Heidi Alexander
Lewisham East
Jeremy Corbyn
Islington North
Jim Fitzpatrick
Poplar and Limehouse
Julian Huppert
Cambridge
Karen Buck
Westminster North
Kate Hoey
Vauxhall
Keith Vaz
Leicester East
Lynne Featherstone
Hornsey and Wood Green
Simon Danczuk
Rochdale
Stephen Pound
Ealing North
Teresa Pearce
Erith and Thamesmead
Brian Donohoe
Central Ayrshire
Once upon a time, there was a woman who got really ticked off because her disabled brother was unable to get a job. Employers told him ‘no’. So she started a business herself and offered him a job.
The year was 1999. The startup location was in Amsterdam, right around the corner from where I was living back then. Today that business has 17 branches all over the country. Two years ago, in 2012, it was acquired by a larger enterprise, but the business philosophy remains the same.
Valid Express only employs couriers who are physically disabled or chronically ill.
Continue reading
Coming up first is Aster v Akerman-Livingstone, on 10 December.
Hotak v London Borough of Southwark has been moved and is now scheduled together with two more cases, Kanu v London Borough of Southwark and Johnson v Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council, on 15 to 17 December. Central question: What is “vulnerability”, in housing matters?
Last month, Minister of State for Justice Simon Hughes announced that £2 million has been set aside towards a package of support for LIPs, with the apparent primary aim of resolving disputes without the involvement of the courts, but also supporting LiPs if their disputes do make it to the courts. That’s what various legal publications published. The Guardian, however, spoke of 1.4 million per year.
The funding is intended for the following:
This initiative is the result of the November 2011 report “Access to Justice for Litigants in Person (or self-represented litigants)“.
Sources:
If you are going to court on your own, or are thinking about it, and have never done anything like that before, watching some episodes of this Justice course on YouTube will give you a better perspective.
It will give you some insight into the reasoning behind laws, and is bound to reveal ideas you had not thought of yet. It shows you that you may feel you are right, but that it can be merely a matter of perspective.
The person you think has wronged you may feel just as strongly that he or she is right and that you are the one who went wrong. It helps to understand that because it can mean that you won’t need to go to court after all.
Privacy is a cultural concept. Privacy does not mean the same in the US as it does in the UK and it does not mean the same in the UK as it does in the Netherlands and it does not mean the same in the Netherlands as it does in Hong Kong.
That’s a challenging idea.
A battle between a Hong Kong-based businessman and internet search giant Google is set to cost some £2.36 million by the time it reaches the end of a five-day trial set for later this month, according to figures given to a High Court judge.
View original post 1,099 more words
London has more legal matters to do with housing than other towns, and this morning, one made it to The Independent. It is a case that will probably also turn up at the Supreme Court after the Court of Appeal rejected the appeal last week, paving the way for similar cases.
Is London carrying out social cleansing by relocating its poorest? Particularly some areas of London seem to keep making negative headlines in this respect.
London earlier caught the revealing glare of the spotlights when it was found to be introducing social apartheid by making poorer tenants use other doors than wealthier tenants in the same building (see the item in The Guardian). I hope that someone decided to sue the city over that, meanwhile.
You can read the article about the case of the family that is asked to move 50 miles (80 km):
here.
Another case coming up soon is Hotak v London Borough of Southwark. This case centres on the question “Is a vulnerable person still a vulnerable person in terms of housing needs if he has a family member to look after him?”
The background is more or less the opposite of bedroom tax craziness. Two brothers were living with a friend; one brother was looking after the other. The two were informed that this was overcrowding, and that they had to leave.
So they applied for housing assistance. The council agreed that they were “unintentionally” homeless, but the council didn’t consider the vulnerable brother a priority because his brother looks after him. (That essentially is a go-ahead for making them both homeless.)
The vulnerable party has learning difficulties, has self-harmed and has had symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. He relies on his brother to be able to cope with life, including matters of personal hygiene.
The Supreme Court will soon deal with two interesting cases concerning housing law and homelessness. The one that has most of my attention is Aster Communities Ltd v Akerman-Livingstone.
Quickly summed up, it is about a man whose specific medical condition (a psychiatric injury as a result of a series of traumatic stressors) led to his local housing authority wanting to evict him from his temporary home, and then rehome him somewhere else. I think I understand his housing authority’s reasoning (which sees this differently, namely as purely following the rules), as well as the tenant’s situation.
In 2010, Mr Akerman-Livingstone was homeless. He has a severe prolonged duress stress disorder (PDSD, which I explain at the bottom of this post). When he went to his local housing authority, the Mendip District Council, the Council accepted that it had a housing duty toward him, a vulnerable citizen with priority needs. It gave him a home.
It is not entirely clear to me whether his disability is generally accepted or not, but that does appear to be so. The Court of Appeal’s judgment states that ‘he is a very sick man’ under 2, but ‘even assuming that Mr Akerman-Livingstone is able to prove his disability to the full’ under 5. In 2010, the District Council agreed that it owed a duty to him as someone with priority needs. This means that the District Council accepted that he has a disability. In 2012, the District Council again accepted that Mr Akerman-Livingstone has this disability, when he applied to them again as he was being threatened with homelessness as a result of the eviction proceedings that are at the heart of this case. So his disability appears to be fully accepted.
Why is he being evicted, you ask? Was he was causing problems for neighbours or had he developed serious rent arrears? No. There were no problems. The underlying reason for the eviction is that the District Council saw his current flat as merely the man’s temporary home. He cannot continue to live in his current home, says the District Council, because it wants to be able to give his current home to someone else who is homeless (likely also on a temporary basis). One can reasonably ask why the District Council does not simply give the homes they offered to Mr Akerman-Livingstone to other persons who are homeless and let Mr Mr Akerman-Livingstone continue to live in his current home. Problem solved, one would think, but real life is rarely that simple.
The problem started when the District Council wanted Mr Akerman-Livingstone to leave his current home and choose a different property where he would then have to move to. Because of his disability, he could not cope with that idea and everything it involved. His uncooperative response was considered ‘rejection of offers of suitable accommodation’ although it is a direct result of his specific psychiatric condition. It is like faulting a blind person for nor passing a vision test, in this very specific case. If Mr Akerman-Livingstone had not had this specific psychiatric injury, he would not have had such a problem coping. Essentially, the man requires peace and quiet and needs to be left in peace. Anyway, the District Council gave up and considered itself released from its obligation to house Mr Akerman-Livingstone.
The District Council then asked the housing association (Aster Communities Ltd, formerly Flourish Homes Limited) to start eviction proceedings against Mr Akerman-Livingstone so that the District Council could give his home to a different homeless person. When the housing association did this, Mr Akerman-Livingstone (presumably someone acting for him as his solicitor) responded that this was discrimination against him because of his disability (the PDSD). That, so he said, was in breach of Section 15 of the Equality Act 2010.
The court had two options for dealing with this: to proceed to a full trial to decide about the discrimination issue and then rule on the eviction or deal with the matter summarily, that is, take the shortcut that takes up a lot less time and money and which is what usually happens in eviction proceedings.
Not surprisingly, Mr Akerman-Livingstone wanted a full trial. Equally unsurprising is that the housing association did not. On 7 June 2013, the sitting judge agreed with the housing association.
To be allowed a full trial, Mr Akerman-Livingstone needed to have a seriously arguable case (that is, a fighting chance to win that case) in the eyes of the judge (judge Denyer). The judge did not think so and ordered the immediate eviction. Mr Akerman-Livingstone’s lawyer filed an appeal against this, but that appeal was rejected on 14 October 2013 by a second judge, at the High Court. Next, Mr Akerman-Livingstone’s lawyer appealed against the decision of the second judge. That appeal was heard in London, at the Court of Appeal, by Lady Justice Arden, Lady Justice Black and Lord Justice Briggs.
The Court of Appeal felt that it needed to answer two questions:
Well, said the Court of Appeal, even ‘if Mr Akerman-Livingstone is able to prove his disability to the full’, if Aster can show that the eviction proceedings are ‘a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim’ in the sense of Section 15(1)(b) of the Equality Act 2010, there will not have been unlawful discrimination.
That said, the burden of proof is shared (Section 136 of the Equality Act 2010), continued the Court of Appeal, and that means that Mr Akerman-Livingstone ‘has to do no more than show that there are facts from which, in the absence of some other explanation, the court could conclude that Aster had discriminated against him.’
The Court of Appeal then looked at what the lower courts had done, and at what the European Court on Human Rights (located in Strassbourg, France) had said about related matters and similar cases. The Court of Appeal ended up agreeing with the judge who had sat in the High Court (the second judge, Justice Cranston). It felt that Mr Akerman-Livingstone’s case was not seriously arguable as his interests were not seen as heavily outweighing those of the housing association (proportionality).
The question as to what kind of tenancy Mr Akerman-Livingstone has did come up at some point, but is not important within this context.
First, Mr Akerman-Livingstone would have to show that to be evicted would amount to discrimination because of his condition (the PDSD).
Section 15 (Discrimination arising from disability) of the Equality Act 2010 says:
This shows that the case hinges on 15(1)(b). 15(1)(a) appears to be the case and 15(2) does not apply. If the housing association and the District Council had not known about Mr Akerman-Livingstone’s disability condition, it would have been impossible for them to be guilty of discrimination, as a person is not able to discriminate on the grounds of something he or she does not know. That was likely never a serious point of debate, as Mr Akerman-Livingstone had been given his current home in 2010 because the disability classified him as a vulnerable person with priority needs and in 2012, the District Council again accepted him as a person with priority needs.
It is often very hard to prove discrimination; that is why the burden of proof is shared (Section 136, Equality Act 2010), which means that the other party also has to show that it did not discriminate:
The real problem seems to be that it is the Housing Act that appears to be doing the discriminating – puts Mr Akerman-Livingstone at a disadvantage because of his disability – because it does not define ‘refuse’ and appears to contain no provisions for anyone who can be seen as ‘refusing’ an offer of housing when that ‘refusal’ is a direct consequence of a disability. In this case, the ‘refusal’ is an integral part of Mr Akerman-Livingstone’s disability. His condition led to the tick mark in that box that allowed the District Council to consider itself released of its duties toward Mr Akerman-Livingstone (which then in itself led to new duties, as the District Council releasing itself of its duties and starting eviction proceedings against him threatened to make him homeless again).
The man requires peace and quiet, not yet another upheaval and series of stressors. Moving home is one of the major life stressors, and the mere thought of having to decide on where he wants to move to next apparently already is too much for him. Moving home may aggravate his condition.
Frankly, I believe that the housing authority (the District Council) and housing association would have done a better job managing everyone’s resources including their own if the District Council had simply housed someone else in the properties offered to Mr Akerman-Livingstone and allowed Mr Akerman-Livingstone to continue to live in his current flat, as I already mentioned. Generally speaking, though, any party is free to choose to either carry out bad management or good management if it has the right to carry out that management and does not infringe on other parties’ rights.
There is another twist to the story. The head lessor is not Aster Communities Ltd but a property developer and the property developer apparently has asked Aster to deliver up the premises without any tenants in them. If that is the case, then the argument that the rights of other homeless persons are just as important as the rights of Mr Akerman-Livingstone might no longer apply (although the District Council’s new housing duties toward Mr Akerman-Livingstone appear to be less than what they were in 2010).
If it is indeed the case, however, that the District Council wants to evict Mr Akerman-Livingstone from his flat so that it can give the flat to someone else who is homeless, then in theory, it could end up rehoming Mr Akerman-Livingstone in the same flat from which he is being evicted (and that might even be with the head lessor as his new landlord, instead of Aster Communities Ltd).
Moreover, perhaps the District Council could have foreseen this course of events – in view of the man’s specific medical condition – when it housed the man in 2010. It could have prevented it. It could have given him a home it considered long-term housing and not just temporary. (It may not have been in a position to do that; it depends on the circumstances.)
It appears to be the housing and homelessness charity Shelter that is instructing the lawyers acting for Mr Akerman-Livingstone.
I am interested in the response from the Supreme Court. Decisions by the Supreme Court can have far-reaching consequences.
I emphasise that the above is just a general description of the background of this case. I also add that, unlike what the public may often think, justices and judges rarely have the freedom to apply their personal view and sometimes are forced to decide in a way they wish they did not have to. They have to take other cases into consideration, for example, and apply the law consistently.
—–
PDSD stands for Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder, but this is an outdated phrase. The correct name of the condition is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Complex PTSD. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) considers PTSD a condition related to trauma and stressors, and includes Complex PTSD (or PDSD). DSM-5 was published on May 18, 2013. The previous edition of the DSM included PTSD but not the variant Complex PTSD, so I understand.
Someone with PTSD, complex or otherwise, can either be the victim or the witness of trauma. More specifically, it can concern:
1. Directly experiencing the traumatic event(s);
2. Witnessing the event(s);
3. Learning that the event(s) occurred to one or more close relatives or close friends;
4. Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the event(s).
I guess you could see someone with Complex PTSD as someone who has been hit with a baseball bat very badly, figuratively speaking, over and over and over, again and again, and who never got the chance to recover. That is just my lay person’s view, however.
See also this short later post.
The unfairness and injustice to which so many Britons are subjected often feels like someone is spitting in my face.
A few minutes ago, I was composing a letter to someone and found myself explaining something, and then found myself wanting to dive into the issue. It made me realise that there is probably a need in the UK for an organisation of smart volunteers – a bit like the Innocence project in the US – that carries out research and investigations for various cases that need more support but are hampered by a lack of funds.
So I did a web search. First I found an organisation that often holds marches in the UK and is generally shunned (and later became banned by the government). Then I found the Bar Pro Bono Unit. It is a charity which helps to find pro bono (free) legal assistance from volunteer barristers.
I also found the National Pro Bono Centre, with links to additional organisations.
The UK has its own Innocence Project. It was started in 2004.
Here in Portsmouth, the university’s law school carries out various pro bono activities.
That’s how many per day?