The scrutiny begins the moment you enter the building: you empty your pockets, hand over your bags, and everything goes into a tray to be checked by the security guard
Lorna and Fred attended Grace's tribunal as fellow members and representatives of Food and Solidarity, they were there in solidarity as we are not able to provide any legal advice. Below is a description of the day.
Lorna:
Newcastle Civil & Family Courts and Tribunals Centre The scrutiny begins the moment you enter the building: you empty your pockets, hand over your bags, and everything goes into a tray to be checked by the security guard. Naturally, you feel nervous, even though you’ve nothing at all to be nervous about. While they pick through all of your stuff, another security guard gestures you forward and waves a wand over you. You get the OK, so you go back to the counter and clumsily shove everything back into your pockets and bags and move on to the window. Then you wait.
You wait at the window to find out which corridor to go down. You wait to find out if there’ll be a solicitor available to present the case. You wait for the usher to ask the judge who is allowed to attend the hearing. You wait, and all the time you want to pull someone aside and ask them whether they’d think it’s fair if they were about to be thrown out of their home for no reason.
The landlord strolls past.
Grace presented her own appeal to the judge, there was no solicitor available that wasn’t connected to the landlord. Only Fred was allowed to accompany the family into the hearing, so I sat on the steps of the court building and tried to decipher the outcome from the landlord’s expression when he walked by me.
It was a better result than it could have been, Grace won six more weeks to find somewhere else to live, but the price of just asking a judge not to approve her family being made immediately homeless was £1,315.00. The judge ruled that Grace must pay £1,315 towards the legal fees of the landlord who has made her family’s life miserable for over a year and is preparing to kick them out. Anyone expecting the law to be fair hasn’t encountered Section 21.
The community is raising money to make sure that court costs are covered, and our next step will be ensuring Grace and her family have somewhere to go when the six weeks is up; they have been amazing throughout, and they deserve all of the support we can give them.
Fred
“No-one wants to be here today” was the judge’s conclusion, “I am afraid I am going to have to share the pain between both parties”. That was the most bizarre part of the whole hearing. On one side, you had someone on universal credit, facing imminent eviction and unable to get even a legal aid lawyer for the afternoon. On the other side, you had a landlord – presumably with their own house safely paid for – a second house they wanted to sell, a small plumbing business and a fully paid-up professional lawyer. And yet, the judge decided that ‘sharing’ meant that Grace would need to pay over £1,300 to her far wealthier landlord to fund her own eviction. A child could tell you that this was not fair.
You couldn’t reasonably call Judge Coulthard a monster, either. He gave Grace the legal maximum of 6 weeks to prepare for eviction, and set Grace’s repayment costs to £10 per month over the protests of the landlord’s lawyer. He seemed genuinely regretful that the section 21 form was filled in correctly, and that as a result, he had to order Grace out of her house. He was polite and respectful throughout the proceedings, and he probably didn’t spend years working his way up to being a judge for the purpose of evicting people on the breadline. Yet here he was.
Perhaps the judge told himself the same things many of us tell ourselves when we find ourselves ethically uncomfortable: that this was beyond his control, that there was nothing he could do to change it. But this isn't really the truth. Grace was in court that day because the Tory government broke the promise made back in 2019 to end section 21 evictions. Grace was losing her house because her landlord decided that putting more cash into his business was more important than another human being having warmth and shelter. All of this was the consequences of a society and legal system which values making profits over human happiness and life itself. Grace was in court that day because of decisions that people had made – decisions that could have been made differently. In a society full of empty houses, homelessness and evictions are not inevitable – they are a political choice.
Food and Solidarity was there that day because we know the world doesn’t have to be this way, and we are choosing to make it different. We were able to make sure that Grace’s wasn’t alone during the awful farce of paying to lose her home. We helped her to raise the money she needed to pay her court fees, and we will stand by her side to fight the safe housing and dignity she deserves. If you want to join us in our struggle for safe, fair and affordable housing for all, either sign up as a member or contribute to Grace’s eviction fund.
