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New approaches to housing disputes
The Law Commission published its paper Housing: Proportionate Dispute Resolution in April this year. The Commission describes this as an 'issues paper'; however, ASA believes that the paper is more an academic exercise lacking in focus, which fails to prioritise the important issues in housing disputes. It also asks for responses to 155 questions, which seems excessive. The key proposals include:
- A system of "Triage plus" to diagnose housing problems and determine the appropriate form of dispute resolution
- An increased and better co-ordinated use of alternative dispute resolution methods
Triage plus
The term 'triage' has been adopted from the medical concept of initial diagnosis and determination of treatment priorities. 'Triage plus' in housing has three aims:
- Signposting – creating a coherent advice and information system
- Oversight – identifying and solving systemic problems
- Intelligence gathering – collecting information to perform signposting and oversight effectively.
As justification for its proposals, the paper claims that "few, if any, current advice providers are able to offer their clients the full range of available options", but offers no evidence to support this. ASA has considerable doubts about this claim; in order to comply with the Specialist Quality Mark, the 169 NfP agencies and 410 solicitors' firms that have LSC housing contracts have had to demonstrate specialist housing knowledge, and show that they are able to advise clients on the full range of options available. It is not clear what additional benefit triage plus would offer, or where extra resources would come from.
Dispute resolution
The paper proposes:
- Making greater use of management responses such as performance indicators and complaints procedures to ensure that first decisions are correct, and to put wrong decisions right quickly
- Rationalising the role of ombudsmen in housing disputes
- Identifying the housing contexts where mediation may be particularly appropriate or inappropriate
- Generating debate about how to improve the existing system of courts and tribunals
ASA has concerns about reliance on management responses to achieve better outcomes; this paper provides no evidence that such systems are effective. The Law Commission also suggests that housing "problems" are turned into "disputes" by advisers who seek legal remedies. ASA believes that this is a dangerous misrepresentation. It could equally be claimed that housing problems are turned into disputes by landlords and local authorities who fail to meet their legal obligations. What is needed is an accessible and affordable system for enforcing legal rights.
By not prioritising the most serious problems, this paper tries to address far too wide a range of issues, and fails to offer useful solutions to any of them. We hope that the consultation paper to be published later this year will focus on offering practical solutions to the most serious housing problems.
Responses to this paper are invited by July 11th. See the Law Commission website
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