Loophole stymies case against 'UK's worst neighbours'

Housing association chiefs are banking on the Antisocial Behaviour Bill to close a loophole that allows nuisance tenants to continue to harass former neighbours after eviction, it emerged this week.

Associations have been hampered in their attempts to tackle antisocial behaviour and protect witnesses by their inability to obtain freestanding injunctions.

These injunctions are available to councils, and have been used to prevent evicted tenants from returning to cause trouble in their former neighbourhoods.

The Antisocial Behaviour Bill, now at committee stage in the Commons, should give associations the same injunction powers as councils.

Angus Macdonald, head of housing at Medina Housing Association, said: "The difficulty is that housing associations' injunctions don't apply after evictions – councils have power of arrest attached to an injunction for five years after an eviction."

Macdonald also claimed that the law on injunctions made it impossible to deal with the most disruptive tenants, despite having them evicted. He cited one case that was featured on Carlton Television's Neighbours from Hell, shown this Wednesday.

Dubbed the most obnoxious family in Britain, members of the Case family terrified fellow residents by firing air rifles in the street, fighting and breaking windows.

Medina succeeded in getting the family evicted last November. But it then lost an appeal at the House of Lords to have injunctions imposed against family members preventing them from returning to their former street, despite the fact they had moved to another house just around the corner.

Concerns have been raised previously (HT 11 April, page 11) that the drafting of crucial sections of the bill could inadvertently prevent housing associations and councils from targeting non-tenants with injunctions.

The Social Landlords' Crime and Nuisance Group has lobbied Louise Casey, head of the government's antisocial behaviour unit, for the sections to be redrafted in order to resolve any possible problems of interpretation.

The group hopes Home Office minister Lord Falconer will announce that changes are being considered when he speaks at this month's Chartered Institute of Housing conference.

Meanwhile, housing associations are beginning to make use of new powers enabling them to apply to county courts for antisocial behaviour orders as part of an application for possession. Stafford council is understood to have made one of the first this week. The powers became available in April when provisions of the Police Reform Act 2002 came into force.