ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the implications of section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 for homeless people, an Act that firmly established squatting as a criminal justice, rather than a housing issue. The history of squatting is a history of housing crisis. On 14 September 1946, five Communist Party (CP) members were arrested for their involvement in the occupations and commentators agree that this marked the end of the more visible post-war squatters' movement. The Greater London Council (GLC) began acquiring the properties in the late 1960s with a view to demolishing them and building blocks of flats. On the rare occasion that a relationship between squatting and housing stress is acknowledged by politicians it echoes a kind of 'perversity rhetoric', where policies intended to alleviate poverty are deemed to result in perverse outcomes, i.e. to perpetuate the very problem they sought to resolve.
