A new property law enables the council to confiscate your home if it has been empty for over six months.
It's an old saying, a trope or a truism if you prefer, that "An Englishman's home is his castle". Whatever happens outside in the streets, whatever idiocies the current political pygmies have decided to inflict upon the populace, the possession and enjoyment of one's own property was safe, guarded by both law and custom. Certainly there were eminent domain purchases, broadly in line with American practice but as of the first of this month the government no longer even has to pay.
Yes, you did read that correctly, your paid off, unmortgaged, fully owned property can be taken away from you without your even being paid for it.
The law is here: The Housing (Empty Dwelling Management Orders) (Prescribed Exceptions and Requirements) (England) Order 2006. Something of a mouthful, I know, but what this and the preceding pieces of legislation actually state is that if you leave a property uninhabited for 6 months then the local council can take it from you and rent it to whomever it likes. There are a few exceptions, such as vacation homes and so on, but at a stroke the entire basis of property law has changed. Instead of it being yours to do with as you wish it is yours as long, and only as long, as you do as the government wishes.
The set up is that if you have left the property empty then the local council must make reasonable efforts to contact you to let out the house or apartment. If you still decide that you don't want to, then they will do it for you. Worse, far worse, is if their "reasonable efforts" don't actually find you, then they'll do it without actually telling you. These orders allowing them to do this will last 7 years, and can be extended. Yes, this will even be possible in the case of a death: the inheritors have 6 months (not from probate, but from the granting of representation: and there are many only even mildly complicated estates that can take more than 6 months to run the executor's course) to dispose of the property or conceivably have it compulsorarily rented out from underneath them.
That local council can charge you a management fee for this service that you obviously don't want and should then pass on to you whatever is left of the rent they have been charging your new unwanted tenant. Your new tenants will not, of course, be quite from the top drawer of society, for like anywhere else in the world, that's not the social stratum from whom the inhabitants of "social" housing are drawn. Yet you will be responsible for the costs of ensuring that said housing is maintained to the highest standards, whether or not they actually pay any rent; indeed, you won't actually be able to evict them if they should trash the place for, of course, you are not the manager or agent for the property; that is the local council.
Here's the full article.
6 comments:
[...] this will even be possible in the case of a death: the inheritors have 6 months (not from probate, but from the granting of representation: and there are many only even mildly complicated estates that can take more than 6 months to run the executor's course) to dispose of the property or conceivably have it compulsorarily rented out from underneath them.
I've just been in exactly this situation (selling off inherited property.) It was not particularly complicated and it still took me 9 months.
Would the Tories have introduced this, do you think?
Maybe you guys should write your constitution down on a piece of paper so everyone would know where they stand when things like this come up.
Well said. Couldn't agree more.
Kevin McCloud argues that this new legislation is deeply flawed.
Use it or lose it
The Sunday Times
...
'So if, for example, you’re in the unhappy position of having lost an elderly relative and are in the process of dividing up the estate, the chances are that, if you don’t get a move on, you might find your relative’s house suddenly occupied by a family from the social housing list.
Or there again, if your auntie dies in September and you think you would like to wait for the spring upturn in the housing market before selling her place, I’d think again.'
...
'Underneath these orders lies an even more sinister threat to one of our most basic civil liberties dating back to Magna Carta: the removal of ownership of property by removing the control of it.
Robert Whelan of the Civitas think tank believes it cuts right across the ancient common law principle of private property. “I think anybody whose property is seized should go straight to court to see if a judge thinks it should stand,” he says.'
More on the Empty Dwelling Management Orders Act in The Telegraph:
The Government admitted that the purpose of the new laws was to provide "a credible threat" and was intended to put pressure on the owner. Yet empty public sector properties were unaffected and exempt from the new powers. Under the Orders a private home could be seized for up to seven years, 28 days after an Order was granted - and with no right of appeal.
A home did not have to be blighted, boarded up or uninhabitable to be seized, merely empty for six months, including homes of the recently deceased.
Homes for sale could be seized if a council thought the asking price "unrealistic".
...
Once seized, there was no obligation to obtain a market rent, and social tenants could be housed in the property. The owner could even be charged and billed for their property being seized, if service or standing charges were greater than the rent, after the council deducted its "expenses".
(tip Tim worstall)
Here's the link to the Telegraph article refered to above.
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