Government announce crackdown on anti-social behaviour

Last week we heard from the UK Government that they plan to give landlords more powers to evict unruly tenants.

The Government announced an action plan to crack down on anti-social behaviour giving more powers to the police to target perpetrators with swift and visible justice in England and Wales.

As well targeting anti-social behaviour on the streets and in our communities the action plan highlights that sustained acts of intimidating or disruptive behaviour will not be tolerated and should lead to the eviction of the tenant involved. The Government will be changing laws and arming landlords with tools to ensure that anti-social tenants will face consequences including making the grounds for possession faster and easier to prove.

Other measures include:

• ensuring all private tenancy agreements include clauses specifically banning anti-social behaviour
• expand the discretionary eviction ground, to make anti-social behaviour easier to prove in court and speed up the process of evicting by exploring how to prioritise these cases in Possession Lists in the courts
• preventing short-term lets importing anti-social behaviour into communities, with a new registration scheme to give local authorities data to easily identify short-term lets to act against if a let proves problematic. A consultation on the registration scheme will be published shortly

It is promising that the Government is responding to landlords calls for better enforcement of anti-social behaviour, however greater clarity is needed on how the measures will work in practice and when the new legislation will be in effect.