A great victory for the new squatting law

CLAPTON

ruggedtoast wrote: »

He wasn't convicted for breaking and entering. He wasn't convicted for upsetting the neighbours, being rude to the queen, being an unwashed poor person or any of the other crimes you people have attributed to this story because it involves someone you look down on.

He was convicted, of squatting, for which he now has a criminal record and 3 months inside.

As none of us know the full details of the court hearing and none know the thinking behind the judges decision we can all speculate as we like.

However sticking to the essense of the matter, squatting is antisocial, often violent, often involves breaking and entering, often associated with drug talking and genral criminal behaviour, often cause consideration damage, often causes considerable legal expense, often causes considerable distress to the owners and many other things too.

Fortunately it is now illegal and one trusts that future people will be given considerably longer sentences. One hopes that in this particular case the judge was being generous as the law is so recent.

Loughton_Monkey

Squatting is now illegal. This was introduced with the purpose of ending the propensity of people to squat.

The first case came up.

Consider which sentence would be most likely to diminish the number of squatters in the future:

A. 12 months in Jail
B. A suspended 7 day sentence and 3 months probation.

John_Pierpoint

My bet is that the silly b*gg*rs failed to realise that the law has changed, and then gave the housing association and the Old Bill a load of lip.

If that is not the case and they were slapped in cuffs when attempting to leave, then I want to know why taxes are being wasted on this pointless provision of a roof and 3 square meals per day.

Up to now the police have done their very best to avoid applying the law of "trespassing with a motor vehicle", perhaps scared of the accusation of racism from the travelling community.

GeorgeHowell

The squatting law was not brought in to stop individuals occupying empty property such as that held onto by developers until it was more lucrative to sell. If they'd stuck to that then the old arguments would still be going on. It was brought in to stop the idiots who occupied private residential property whilst people were on holiday, or where the the property was empty for a short time due to house buying chains etc. This caused ordinary people to be made homeless with their legitimately owned property unavailable to them for long periods whilst civil legal proceedings took place. Completely unacceptable, indefensible, and it badly needed to be criminalised. All squatters have suffered because of the idiots who did that.