Housing Law

The resources available through this page relate to the security and condition of your home. It includes landlord and tenant law, the law relating to homeless people, housing allocation and housing conditions.

You can find links to interesting housing law websites here:

NACAB's Adviceguide gives a good description of the rights of tenants and homeless persons under the heading "Housing".

Housing and Human Rights

The UK has incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights ("ECHR") through the Human Rights Act 1998 ("HRA"). However, the ECHR mostly deals with civil and political rights rather than economic, social and cultural rights, such as the right to housing. Although the courts have acknowledged that shelter is a basic human right (R (Limbuela) v SSHD [2005] UKHL 66; [2006] 1 AC 396), the European Court of Human Rights has decided that there is no right to housing in the ECHR (Burton -v- UK (1996) 22 EHRR CD 135).

However, there is such a right in a number of other human rights instruments, see the links below:

• International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Art.11(1)
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Art.5(e)(iii)
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Art.14(2)
• Convention on the Rights of the Child, Art.27
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Arts.19 and 28
• Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Art.21
• Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers, Art.43(1)(d) (treaty not ratified by UK)
• European Social Charter (revised), Art.31 (revision not yet ratified)

See my articles Applying the Right to Housing [2002] JHL 11 and The Other Human Rights [2001] Human Rights 156 as to how the right to housing could be used in English courts. Note that the Disabilities Convention has a special status in being deemed to have the status of an EU treaty: European Communities (Definition of Treaties) (United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) Order 2009.

In July 2015 Just Fair produced a report, Protecting the Right to Housing in England: A Context of Crisis, which measured the performance of the UK against the right to housing and found it severely wanting. The Report made a number of recommendations as to how performance could be improved, although implementation seems unlikely in view of the current government's attitude.