A report on an interesting housing case in the Court of Appeal, from Nearly Legal. Essentially the result is that, when deciding http://www.gooakley.com/ whether you’re homeless and in need of being housed, a local authority can’t just turn you down because there’s property abroad that you could occupy; it has to take into account how reasonable it is to expect you to live there, and only if it is can they turn you down because of it.
A specialist housing case on a technical issue of statutory interpretation – or so it appears on the surface. But also a cheap oakley case that’s important in the way it deal with the rights of British citizens with links abroad, and immigrants living here (although Mr. Maloba is in fact a British citizen it seems to me the same principles would apply even were he not) to obtain state assistance. Councils will be able to refuse to house someone on the basis that there’s property they could live in abroad – but only if it’s reasonable to expect them to go there.
Unfortunately, the flip side is that someone who leaves settled accommodation to come to the UK and then applies as homeless, without having had settled accommodation here in the interim, will be classed as intentionally homeless and refused assistance.
Thanks, NL, for the original post and your comment. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
You say “settled” accommodation so maybe you’ve taken account of this already, but do you think there’d be any mileage in arguing, say, that there was some reason you had to leave your accommodation abroad, so it’d be unreasonable to expect you to have stayed there? Or is there some other reason that argument has to fail?