Neighbour disputes, social landlords and the law

Abstract

The physical form of much modern social housing, coupled with the allocation practices of social landlords, increasing opportunities to create noise as audio systems develop and proliferate, racial disputes and inter-generational conflict, often result in degrading tension and conflicts between neighbours. For a variety of reasons traditional social mechanisms apt to deal with such problems frequently do not exist in many areas, and householders are increasingly looking for institutional answers to their problems such as the involvement of their local authority or housing association in its capacity as a landlord. Such social landlords do have a wide variety of powers to intervene in dispute situations, though their use is subject to a number of legal and logistic constraints. The submission of this article is, however, that, despite those constraints, there is a strong ethical case for institutional landlords to use their powers to deal with the most serious instances of neighbour dispute, though in less serious cases it is preferable to adopt conciliatory and mediative techniques to help parties find their own solutions to problems.