From 1st September (Sat) squatting in residential premises becomes illegal. It will be a criminal offence and so the police can come and arrest squaters and cart them off.

A spokesman for the homeless charity, Crisis, said ""Ultimately the government needs to tackle why homeless people squat in the first place by helping not punishing them." There are no doubt many squats that are ultimately just taking the pis$, but at the same time there will be many affected that I would have sympathy with, and the impression I have is that the incidence of homelessness and sleeping rough in city doorways is on the rise, and has been for a while. Whilst there remain thousands of perfectly serviceable dwellings which stand empty for years, with poor people freezing in piles of cardboard nearby.

No real suggestions about what else they could have brought in. Maybe, for instance, a progressive tax which significantly rises the longer dwellings are left empty, the proceeds to go to homeless charities and organisations? Not a straightforward subject.

This is great news.

I rent out property. Every now and again it stands empty for a few months.

Evicting squatters would have been a nightmare, but as of Saturday all it would take is one phonecall to the old bill, who will probably be only to happy to go round there and do it for me.

Replace Coucil Tax, which is simply a ba[is[/itardised form of poll tax, with Land Value Taxation. Once empty plots of land and empty buildings are being charged at the maximum developed potential of the land, we'll soon see a rise in occupancy.

spoken as someone who rents

If I own a property and choose to keep it empty, that is my right as a property owner.

Now where did I suggest you didn't have that right?

quite right, you suggested taxing me to the hilt, as is usual.

It's also the government's duty to act in the best interests of the nation. So, if the mandate is there they could tax empty property or place conditions on your continued ownership.

How would this work in practice? And what happens to people of modest means who live in property that may be worth considerably more than when they bought it?

BLAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Again? Come on, change the record.

It won't make any difference at all. None, whatsoever. It won't work, and it's a stupid idea. Especially when the subject is squatters, who NEVER ever have any justification for squatting.

If they live in it it's not empty.

But the proposal was a replacing council tax with land tax. I imagine that this would affect all properties, regardless of if anyone is actually in residence.

It's the value of the land that's taxed, not the property that sits on it. Hence the name: Land Value Taxation

Of course it would make a difference.
A lot of people sitting on empty properties, finding that they were being taxed on them, would want to divest, surely?
How could it not make a difference?
There will be many who wouldn't agree with it, sure ... but to say it would make no difference?


Exquisitely argued, Oh you've swayed me there.


NEVER is quite sweeping.

If I went away on holiday and came back to find someone living in my home, I'd be extremely narked, as would just about everyone in the same situation ... and I think we'd all say that just wasn't a fair reason to squat.
However, if I were homeless and skint and I knew of, say, a house owned by a foreign company, boarded-up and hadn't been occupied for years (an example on R4 this morning), I might think I was justified in putting my sleeping bag in there rather than across the front doorway of Marks and Spencer.

Then again, if those administering the rental market were a little more innovative maybe there wouldn't be so many unoccupied houses.

When I was a poor and starving student down the smoke, I and a few mates liberated a very des res just off Ken High St for a few months. We were I suppose squatters, though never bothered with any of the notices etc. All the time we lived there, nobody ever spoke to us, nobody called. We did no harm and caused no damage. How did we make the world any worse?

You probably made some of your neighbours, the ones who were rather stupidly paying extremely large mortgages or extremely high rents for their identical properties, shake their fists and shout "Grrrr" at you as they climbed into their extremely expensive cars parked at their extremely expensive parking spots each morning.

"Grrrr" they would have said through gritted teeth, "pesky students, shoot them all, wait until I'm an MP rather than just an unpaid intern, I'll have them all made illegal that I will", and David, CallMeDave, will have climbed into the car that his daddy bought for him, waved goodbye at the house that his daddy rented for him and drove off to the internship that his daddy organised for him.

Go on, admit it, you don't know the first thing about LVT do you?

Not only that, you'r too pig-headed to even read some basic facts about LVT. Similar to the right-wing press, you'd sooner just reject something that you haven't got a clue about.

Let's extend the principle of squatters' rights.

As you are reading RL Fans at the moment, the chances are you are not driving you car. Mind if someone else jumps in and goes for a ride?

As for your savings account, it's Friday night and you are clearly not actively using that money at the moment. Would you mind if someone accessed you bank account, took the money and blew it at Stringfellows?

Very few buildings are left open access. Squatting is thus a usually criminal damage (to get into the building), typically followed by theft.

This activity is also known as burglary.

I tend to agree with lawyer David Allen Gree on Twitter

You could add the criminalisation of infringing Olympic[size=50TM[/size - related intellectual property rights of multinational corporations who are hardly short of a lawyer.

Interesting to note that it's only private and not commercial premises that are covered

Compulsory purchase orders could go some way to relieving the shortage in housing.

Property empty for more than a reasonable period of time - owner can't be traced - council buys and rents out. Profits put into bank account so they can be passed to the owner as and when they are located.

People can chat on this thread all they want, but I really do feel that if they returned from holiday to find a bunch of squatters in their house, they would be the first ones wanting the police to take action.

Returning from holiday to find squatters isn't the usual scenario though is it - the usual scenario is that a property is chosen that has stood empty for some time, ie months.

The major problem with councils administering empty buildings is that many of the empty buildings that you see in most towns are already council owned either because they just don't have the money to modernise or carry out repairs to empty properties, or because the properties are in undesirable locations and won't rent out at commercial rates (chicken and egg situation).

A prime example was the one in Birmingham on the BBC News this morning, a substantial house that had obviously been a park keepers house, stone built, good quality housing and yet boarded up by the council that owned it, probably because it needed money spending on it to bring it up to current rental standards, money that all councils just don't have.

Over thirty years there has been a move away from local authority housing and its only now that we're starting to notice that, actually, council rental properties weren't such a bad idea after all, mainly because any private landlord or even housing associations don't necessarily address the immediate need of having to supply good housing stock in front of the need to make a profit and perpetuate the chase and myth of "market rents".

I have a suggestion to help solve the housing shortage and also bring us back to "living", as opposed to "affordable" rents. "Affordable" rents are usually taken to mean 80% of the prevailing rate, which quite obviously means they are only affordable to a select few.

Government, local & national, own thousands of empty properties and many more thousands of hectares of suitable building land. Given that the average price of building a property, measured in labour and materials cost only, is around 40% of a new property's value - the other 60% is the cost of land. We should offer a 99 year lease to charities or not-for-profit organisations at a peppercorn rent, on the proviso that the houses/flats are then rented at 50% of the prevailing rate. They would also have a covenant that the properties could never be purchased under a right-to-buy.

Institutional investors, like pension funds and insurance companies, would be falling over themselves to fund the builds because they would be investing in gilt-edge securities at a far better rate than government bonds. There is no reason that this could not work with existing empty properties, in need of full refurbishment.

The exchequer would benefit from an increase in employment, so a lower benefit bill because more people would be legitimately removed from the unemployment register and more income tax and NI would be raised. It would also see an increase in VAT receipts because all of these properties would need to be carpeted & furnished. It would further see a reduction in the amount of housing benefits paid because of the lower rents. This rnt reduction would then have a knock-on effect in the private rented sector too.

Of course there would be losers. Banks and building societies would take a hit because suddenly they would see their asset bank reduced as property values fell. The other losers would be those who pumped their money into buy-to-let schemes because they'd have to compete with "living" rents.

But hey, we're all in this together ain't we?

It's a bit more than simply trespassing though isn't it? It's a step further. I see squatting as another form of burglary. You're trespassing and then essentially appropriating the property by using it as if it were your own.