Legal aid voices: housing and repossession

Until January this year, Tracy and husband Melvyn had been living with their five kids at their family home near Derby. The home was repossessed that month on two weeks' notice and the family was offered emergency housing by the council to avoid them being homeless. Friends stepped in. 'At that time I was a wreck. I couldn't cope with crowds and I didn't want to go out. My safe haven had been taken away,' Tracy recalls.

Tracy and Melvyn, together with their three youngest, stayed with neighbours. 'We slept on the floor and the three boys shared a double bed with their son,' she says. Her two oldest children were accommodated elsewhere, one with Tracy's sister and the other with a close friend.

I met Tracy at Derby Housing Aid in March where adviser Gavin Isham had been sorting her family's debt and housing problems over the last few months as part of LAG's 'Access to Justice Audit'. The audit is a 12-month project which is about talking to ordinary people caught up in the legal process about their experiences. Since February, I have been interviewing people in courts, citizens' advice bureaux, law centres and solicitors' firms around the country. I have been talking to ordinary people '“ including those who have lost their homes like Tracy and her family and jobs in the so-called credit crunch '“ about what access to justice means to them. This is the first of a series of 'snapshots' that Solicitors Journal will run on its website which draws on this project.

'We came down here to get some advice and soon realised that we were going to lose the house,' Tracy relates. 'There was no way out of it. We'd struggled for two years on our own.' The family's financial problems began when her husband lost his job a couple of years ago. They were eventually forced out of their home after a lender who provided a consolidation loan of £30,000 pursued possession proceedings. Up until that point they hadn't defaulted on their mortgage.

When Tracy comes into Derby Housing Aid she has good news. The family has been given a four-bed council house. 'Getting rehoused was a complete nightmare. If it hadn't been for Gavin I don't know what we would have done,' she says. 'You have to bid for your home '“ meanwhile my family were living all over the place.' The lawyer also represented them in court.

Derby Housing Aid is part of the Derby CLAC, or Community Legal Advice Centre. The new service, which won the tender in a straight competition with the Sheffield-based company A4E, has 38 paid staff and comprises Derby Citizens Advice, Law Centre, and Housing Aid as well as two solicitors' firms, the Smith Partnership and Moody & Waller. Some 7,522 people came to the CLAC in its first nine months, and 82 per cent came from 'priority groups' '“ the unemployed, low income, BME, victims of violence, etc.

Derby CLAC is feeling the full impact of the current climate. Under its contract with the LSC, it is required to see clients needing specialist advice within two weeks; however, such is demand, the queue for debt work was running at four weeks. At Derbyshire Housing Aid, which runs the duty scheme at the local county court, four out of ten clients face possession orders. They believe that in the three-month period ending in January 2009 some 390 people were at risk of losing their homes '“ a 78 per cent increase on the previous year.