This chapter argues that evictions constitute an everyday form of violence faced by people living in rented accommodation, a form of violence that we describe as ‘domicide’. Evictions involve the forced removal of people from their home and since the financial crash in 2007/08, they have become everyday phenomena in a number of countries, including the USA, Spain, Ireland and Greece. In the UK, evictions have spiked with an estimated 170 evictions carried out each day in 2015. The main drivers of these evictions are rent arrears that are due to recent and direct cuts in household income under austerity and welfare reforms, cuts that directly affect the ability of tenants to pay their rent

Cooper, Vickie

Paton, Kirsteen

English

Open Research Online

17. Domicide, Eviction and RepossessionKirsteen Paton and Vickie CooperEvictions and displacement are common and traumatic events in today’s housing landscape. Evictions involve the forced removal of people from their home and since the financial crash in 2007/08, they have become everyday phenomena in a number of countries, including the USA, Spain, Ireland and Greece. In the UK, evictions have spiked with an estimated 170 evictions carried out each day in 2015.[endnoteRef:1] The main drivers of these evictions are rent arrears that are due to recent and direct cuts in household income under austerity and welfare reforms, cuts that directly affect the ability of tenants to pay their rent. This chapter will argue that evictions constitute an everyday form of violence faced by people living in rented accommodation, a form of violence that we describe as ‘domicide’. [1: 1. Ministry of Justice, Mortgage and Landlord Possession Statistics Quarterly, England and Wales October to December 2015, London: Ministry of Justice, 2015.] First, the chapter will show how the violence of evictions, while not a new phenomenon, has been intensified by the conditions of austerity. While Local Authorities have formally protected tenants from evictions by providing secure tenancies and housing subsidies, such as housing benefit payments, today the most common cause of evictions is rent arrears, most of which are the result of housing benefit cuts. The UK government has played a primary role in the enforcement of evictions through the provision of legislation that has enhanced powers and the role of bailiffs and enforcement companies whose practices are increasingly aggressive and violent. Second, it will show how ‘domicide’ has directly affected the personal and everyday lives of its victims. Eviction –- the forced removal of people from their homes – itself constitutes a primary act of violence. And evictions also generate a series of secondary effects that are also profoundly violent.	Until recently, social housing acted as an important buffer that protected people against the inequities of the housing market. In spite of the growing privatisation and commodification of housing since the 1980s, the political status quo maintained that ‘housing benefit would take the strain’[endnoteRef:2] and protect the poor against the marketisation of private sector rents. Today, 40 per cent of welfare recipients are living in private rented accommodation and the redistributive effects of this means that approximately £9 billion of the housing benefit budget is being spent on private tenancies per year.[endnoteRef:3] Rather than tackling these growing costs through national rent controls, UK government policy individualises the cost by ‘capping’ the maximum amount households can receive in housing benefits. [2: 2. Sarah Heath, Rent Control in the Private Rented Sector (England) Standard Note Briefing papers SN06760, London: House of Commons Library, 2014.]  [3: 3. National Housing Federation, Briefing: The Growing Housing Benefit Spend in the Private Rrented Sector, London, 2016.] Thus, the ‘benefit cap’ introduced under the Welfare Reform Act 2012 limited the total weekly income an individual or family can receive in welfare payments. These caps resulted in an estimated 58,700 households experiencing a reduction in housing benefit (45 per cent in London).[endnoteRef:4] When a household exceeds the overall benefit cap (OBC), their housing benefit payments are reduced. Thus, the cap is administered primarily through housing benefit payments. It is estimated that 50,000 households have lost around £93 per week and 15 per cent are losing around £150 per week.[endnoteRef:5] Given that the cap is administered primarily through housing benefit payments, it would be more accurate to reconceptualise the benefit cap as a ‘rent cap’ because it automatically reduces a person’s rent income.[endnoteRef:6] Another key change affecting rent was the introduction of the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ in 2013 – a subsidy or tax on housing benefit levied at social housing tenants deemed to have a ‘spare’ bedroom. Tenants’ housing benefit payments are reduced if they are assessed as having one or more spare rooms in their rental property. Tenants must themselves make up this rent shortfall. Ian Duncan Smith, the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, suggested that capping household rent would help ‘keep rents under control’,[endnoteRef:7] and that landlords would lower their rents, exerting downward pressure on the market. But these welfare cuts had a very different impact. Private sector rents show no sign of falling and those in poverty and in receipt of welfare benefits now face the greatest risk of eviction. [4: 4. Steven Kennedy, Wendy Wilson, Vyara Apostolova and Richard Keen, The Benefit Cap, Briefing Paper 06294, London: House of Commons Library, 2016.]  [5: 5. Shelter, National Housing Federation, Homeless Link and Crisis, ‘Welfare Reform Bill – House of Lords Report Stage Joint briefing on Clause 94: the overall benefit cap’, 2013, available at: https://england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/410590/Welfare_Reform_Bill_Clause_94_briefing.pdf]  [6: 6. Kirsteen Paton and Vickie Cooper, ‘It’s the state, stupid: 21st gentrification and state-led evictions’, Sociological Research Online, 21 (3), 2016.]  [7: 7. Hansard, 28 June 2010, para. 512, pp. 608–9. ] Today, we see staggering levels of displacement in private and public rented housing, manifesting through debt (see Chapter 10 by David Ellis), rent arrears, eviction and repossession. Since the financial crash and subsequent cuts to welfare benefits, hundreds of thousands of households have fallen into debt, with rent arrears (in both the private and public sectors) increasing by 130 per cent from 2007 to 2013.[endnoteRef:8] Local housing authorities have seen a 94 per cent increase in the number of households with rent arrears, and this trend is partly or wholly due to welfare reforms.[endnoteRef:9] One year after its implementation in April 2014, two thirds of households in England affected by the bedroom tax had fallen into rent arrears, while one in seven families received eviction-risk letters and faced losing their homes. Around 6 per cent of benefit claimants affected by the bedroom tax have been forced to move home as a result.[endnoteRef:10] Given such levels of household debt, it is hardly surprising that there has been an unparalleled rise in the numbers of evictions in the rented sector. In England and Wales, there were 42,000 evictions in the rented sector in 2015. This figure represents a 50 per cent increase in the past four years, and the highest level since records began in 2000.[endnoteRef:11] All together, these changes in policies and legislation around welfare are tantamount to housing violence.  [8: 8. Money Advice Trust, ‘Rent arrears the fastest growing UK debt problem’, 2013, available at: www.moneyadvicetrust.org/media/news/Pages/Rent-arrears-the-fastest-growing-UK-debt-problem.aspx]  [9: 9. Carl Brown, ‘Rise in tenancy terminations’, Inside Housing, 20 June 2014, available at: www.insidehousing.co.uk/rise-in-tenancy-terminations/7004223.article]  [10: 10. BBC News, ‘Housing benefits: changes “see 6% of tenants move”’, 24 March 2014, available at: www.bbc.com/news/uk-26770727 ]  [11: 11. Ministry of Justice, Mortgage and Landlord Possession Statistics Quarterly.] We use the term ‘domicide’ to describe the violent impact that austerity cuts and welfare reforms have on tenants.[endnoteRef:12] Domicide describes ‘the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in the pursuit of specific goals, which causes suffering to the victims’.[endnoteRef:13] In other words, ‘the murder of home’.[endnoteRef:14] At the extreme level, domicide involves the large-scale destruction of homes, settlements and neighbourhoods through war, conflict and national violence. At the everyday level, domicide involves the destruction of homes and neighbourhoods through ‘normal, mundane operations of the world’s political economy’ which manifests through national and local level policy changes that affect housing.[endnoteRef:15] Thus, the destruction of people’s homes is not inevitable but the direct result of human intervention, where policy is as mighty as the bulldozer. We extend the understanding of everyday domicide to describe how austerity cuts have increased housing insecurity and rent arrears, with tenants in social and private renting now facing the greatest risk of eviction and being purged from their home communities.  [12: 12. J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith, Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2001.]  [13: 13. Ibid., p. 12.]  [14: 14. Ibid., p. 3.]  [15: 15. Ibid., p. 106.] The act of eviction involves forcibly removing people from their homes and communities. It is, in essence, a violent experience, involving techniques of forced entry and the physical removal of people from their homes carried out by bailiffs and enforcement agents. Bailiffs also have the power to call for police presence. Many tenants feel threatened by eviction practices, and some have been subject to aggressive and intimidating behaviour.[endnoteRef:16] The government, acknowledging the use of aggressive practices, finally in 2014 introduced regulation aimed at barring bailiffs from using physical force against debtors.[endnoteRef:17] Nonetheless, the violence practices in evictions continue.  [16: 16. BBC News, ‘Councils allow bailiff aggression, says Citizens Advice’, 23 December 2013, available at: www.bbc.com/news/business-25469806]  [17: 17. Ministry of Justice, Taking Control of Goods: National Standards, London: Ministry of Justice, 2014.] In one example of this process, in 2015, a private equity investment firm evicted 140 households from Sweetsway housing estate in North London. The eviction was done in order to free up valuable property and redevelop and build some 300 new ‘affordable’ homes. These evictions were facilitated by a major police operation, supported by High Court enforcement officers armed with heavy battering rams and sledgehammers. The final day of the evictions culminated in violent confrontations as enforcement agents forcibly removed tenants and activists, including a disabled wheelchair user. This form and scale of eviction, described by some as ‘social cleansing’, is not atypical, nor is it limited to London. In 2013, not long after the welfare reforms came into effect, 200 tenants, all of whom were in receipt of housing benefits, were evicted en masse from one landlord’s pool of 1000 properties in Kent because the tenants ‘failed to pay the rent’.[endnoteRef:18] [18: 18. E. Dunkley, ‘Britain’s biggest landlord sells half his buy-to-let property empire’, Financial Times, 11 September 2016. ] These examples of eviction capture the level of violence involved at the enforcement stage. But the violence experienced by individuals and families facing eviction is more deep-seated and devastating and is less visible. The violence of eviction not only concerns the point at which people are forcibly removed from their homes and the hardship they face thereafter. Violence also plays out in the build-up to the eviction, where the threat of being evicted induces much psychological stress and anxiety. One study in Sweden[endnoteRef:19] found that tenants who face losing their homes are up to nine times more likely to commit suicide, compared to the general population. Such violent effects resonate with evidence emerging from the UK. Not long after the welfare reforms were implemented, Housing Associations were put on high alert regarding the impacts of the welfare reforms on their tenant groups. Housing Associations were on ‘suicide watch’, with 50 per cent of housing staff claiming they received at least one suicide threat from a tenant. As a response, housing officers were trained by the Samaritans charity to help assuage suicidal thoughts.[endnoteRef:20] [19: 19. Yerko Rojas and Sten-Åke Stenberg, ‘Evictions and suicide: a follow-up study of almost 22 000 Swedish households in the wake of the global financial crisis’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 4 November 2015, available at: http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2015/11/04/jech-2015-206419.abstract]  [20: 20. Straightforward and Northern Housing Consortium, Impact of Welfare Reform on Housing Employees Research Project, August 2013, available at: www.northern-consortium.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Impact-on-Housing-Staff-Research-Proposal.pdf] Despite these efforts, there are several cases where tenants have committed suicide. We are seeing daily reports about people inflicting bodily harm and committing suicide as a result of the Coalition welfare reforms, namely, reductions in housing benefits and subsequent increase in debt (see Chapter 1 by Mary O’Hara). One victim, a 53-year-old woman, Frances McCormack, committed suicide the day after the Housing Association served an eviction notice on her for not paying rent arrears. Her arrears had accrued because of unpaid bedroom tax. Following the death of her son, Frances McCormack was instantly deemed eligible to pay bedroom tax and was then pursued by her Housing Association. The coroner concluded that Frances probably only intended to ‘stage’ her suicide and use it as ‘persuasive ammunition’ for ‘dealing with her eviction’.[endnoteRef:21] In another case, Nygell Firminger committed suicide in 2012 after he was evicted by his Housing Association for falling into rent arrears. Not long after he was evicted, Nigel returned to his home and committed suicide. The coroner, Andrew Walker, said that Nigel died as ‘as a direct consequence of his being evicted and the effect that the eviction had on his mental health’.[endnoteRef:22] [21: 21. Ashitha Nagesh, ‘Mum who faced bedroom tax eviction after son killed himself found hanged with note to David Cameron’, 22 January 2016, available at:  http://metro.co.uk/2016/01/22/mum-who-faced-bedroom-tax-eviction-after-son-killed-himself-found-hanged-with-note-to-david-cameron-5639229/]  [22: 22. Heather Spurr, ‘Coroner recommends social landlords are told about vulnerable patients’, Inside Housing, 12 September 2013, available at: www.insidehousing.co.uk/nhs-trust-told-to-alert-landlords-after-suicide/6528523.article] As well as leading to ‘inward’ violence in which people harm themselves (see Chapter 1 by Mara O’Hara), eviction also triggers outward violence. Nothing else disturbs a sense of order more than being purged from one’s own home and being displaced far away. The desperation not to lose one’s home has resulted in violent outbursts of resistance from tenants against those trying to evict them.In one incident in 2014, a tenant opened fire and shot a bailiff and housing officer as they tried to evict and remove him from his home. At the trial, the judge said of the tenant, ‘[i]t is alarming that you should go from being a man of good character to commit offences of this type’.[endnoteRef:23] He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. This violent outburst occurred in the same area where the Local Authority, supported by police officers, had recently evicted several squatters to free up property for the private housing market.  [23: 23. Pete Apps, ‘Brixton bailiff shooter jailed for 15 years’, Inside Housing, 16 May 2014, available at: www.insidehousing.co.uk/brixton-bailiff-shooter-jailed-for-15- years/7003781.article] In this chapter we have explored the increasing violence of evictions resulting from austerity cuts and welfare reforms. We have illuminated some of the state practices in these processes of evictions – from its causal role to enforcement role – where tenants in social and private rented housing are being purged from their homes and communities. We argue that the effects of violence are manifested first through the act of eviction itself as people are coercively removed from their homes and that this begets more violence as conflict escalates between enforcement agencies, the  police and tenants. Second is the less documented violence experienced by individuals and families through the psychological impacts which result in grave, physical harm and even suicide. 	The evidence set out in this chapter leaves no doubt that impacts of housing austerity – that we argue constitutes an everyday ‘domicide’ – not only continue to destroy homes but also lives in all of its violent consequences. As housing austerity continues, this violence will also continue. Notes

Domicide, Eviction and Repossession

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