It’s soft touch UK: Just occupy any house you fancy

THE old adage about an Englishman’s home being his castle needs a bit of revision.

George Pope of Barking had his home taken over by squatters George Pope of Barking had his home taken over by squatters

As George Pope of Barking has found out to his cost an Englishman’s home is now a public facility available for anyone to break into and use as their own place.

Mr Pope, 72, had only taken his dogs for a walk. After falling ill he stayed with friends and returned two days later to find that the locks had been changed and his furniture thrown into the street. The house was now being occupied

by Lithuanian squatters who claimed to have paid an agent £3,000 to rent the property for six months.

Yesterday, the Daily Express revealed that the house next door has also been squatted by Lithuanians for the past five months. Angie Belalij, who rents the property from a housing association, had moved out while it was being renovated but returned to find it occupied and a notice in the window warning that anyone attempting to enter will be prosecuted. That strangers should break into your home while you are out is shocking enough in itself, but more disturbing still is the complete inaction of the police and the slowness of the law.

While the squatters in Mr Pope’s house have now left, those in Mr Belalij’s property remain in residence while the

eviction procedure grinds its way through the courts. A ll the while the police just shrug their shoulders and say they can do nothing because it is a “civil matter” – a dispute between private individuals which must be decided in the courts as opposed to a criminal matter in which they could intervene.

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It just isn’t good enough to have a legal situation which enables criminal gangs to march in to our house while we

are down the shops, leaving us homeless for several months. The right to feel safe and secure in our homes is fundamental to civilised values, not least for a 72-year-old man suffering from cancer and arthritis. It is hard to imagine that in any other developed country people could be evicted from their own homes by criminals

and chancers and the law fail to protect them.

What has happened to Mr Pope is what happened to people under the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution; it is not supposed to happen in a Western democracy committed to human rights. What is going on in Barking, however, is a world away from the Seventies image of squatting – a bunch of long-haired students entering an abandoned building and hanging up their Che Guevara posters. The law protects squatters only if the building was unoccupied when they arrived and they did not use force to enter it. In Mr Pope’s case neither of these seem to have been the case.

Mr Pope may not have been present when the squatters arrived but the property was full of his belongings and was

clearly occupied by him. He says that whoever gained entry to the property did so by levering open the back door with screwdrivers. If that is the case, whoever first entered the property by breaking in has committed a criminal offence.

The case is complicated by suggestions that the people actually occupying Mr Pope’s and Ms Belalij’s homes may have been duped by a fraudulent estate agent and may not be guilty themselves of breaking and entering. But it is

disgraceful that the police have refused to act. If there is evidence of breaking and entering – or any damage caused to items which were reportedly thrown out of the windows – there is surely sufficient evidence to arrest the occupants and take them to the police station for questioning.

Once they were gone the legalowners would be within their rights to retake the property. When the police use theexcuse “it’s a civil matter” in order to avoid taking action, it is just like in the bad old days when they refused to intervene in cases of reported wife-beating on the grounds that “it’s a domestic”. But if they are reluctant to act in cases where squatters have broken into buildings it is time we strengthened the law.

How about a new criminal offence of trespassing in an occupied building with intent to squat? What about making it a criminal offence to refuse to leave a building, when asked by the owner, in which you have squatted for less than a month?

Such a law would allow squatters to be forcibly removed from people’s homes – while still allowing squatters

to inhabit buildings which have genuinely been abandoned. Currently the law, and lack of enforcement, is a charter for legalised theft. Imagine if shoplifting was treated the same, so that a store manager who saw you walking out with a television set could not challenge you, or call upon the police to arrest you, but had to pursue you through the courts for its return.

Shoplifting would become rife as criminals gambled that shops would not have the resources to chase every lost item through the courts. Once word gets out about the leniency of our squatting laws you can be sure the problem

will multiply. You can bet that the inaction of the Barking police will already be the talk of  would-be migrants in Lithuania, who will now be telling each other: in Britain you can break into anyone’s house, put up a notice in the window spelling out your rights and there is nothing the owners can do for months to get you out.

It is a shame that the gang which took over Mr Pope’s and Ms Belalij’s homes didn’t pick on the houses of a few politicians or police chiefs. I think we might have got some action a bit sooner.

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