71 Queens Road West London E13 0PE 15 May 2018 Authority Solicitor Public and Regulatory Law TFL Legal, on behalf of: The Greater London Authority 55 Broadway London SW1H 0BD
Dear Sir or Madam, Letter Before Claim I write as a tenant of the Clearing House. The Greater London Authority (GLA) commissions St. Mungo’s to provide Clearing House services. Please find enclosed my Letter Before Claim in compliance with the Pre-Action Protocol for Judicial Review. For the purpose of my claim no distinction is sought to be drawn between the GLA and the Mayor of London. My wife and I have been effectively informed by the Clearing House that we will be living in limbo as from 16 May 2018 and can be served with a Section 21 Notice to vacate our home at any time and without any stated reason (a threat to life). The Clearing House's decision on 10 May 2018 to rule out the re-issue of another tenancy (the “decision”) for two former entrenched rough sleepers who have ongoing high support needs amounts to a type of harassment. No reason has been provided for the decision, notwithstanding my repeated requests for same. I am seeking a review by the GLA of the decision as an exercise of public function. I would argue in judicial review proceedings that a decision by the GLA to deny me this review does not provide me with sufficient procedural protection of my rights, in violation of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998 (Connors v. UK [2004] HLR 52). I look forward to receiving a response in due course and, in any event, by no later than Tuesday, 29 May 2018. Yours faithfully,
Declan Heavey
IN THE MATTER OF A PROPOSED APPLICATION FOR JUDICIAL REVIEW IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION ADMINISTRATIVE COURT BETWEEN: THE QUEEN on the application of Declan Heavey Proposed Claimant -andThe Greater London Authority Proposed Defendant -andSt. Mungo’s Proposed Interested Party
JUDICIAL REVIEW PRE-ACTION PROTOCOL LETTER BEFORE CLAIM
Proposed claim for judicial review To Public and Regulatory Law, Transport for London, 55 Broadway, London SW1H 0BD Acting on behalf of: The Greater London Authority (GLA) The Claimant Declan Heavey, 71 Queens Road West, London E13 0PE Defendant’s reference details None. 1
Details of the legal advisers, if any, dealing with this claim None. Details of the matter being challenged The GLA commissions St. Mungo’s to provide Clearing House services. The proposed claimant is challenging the decision issued on 10 May 2018 by Clearing House that rules out the re-issue of another tenancy for two former entrenched rough sleepers (the proposed claimant and his wife) who have ongoing high support needs. No reason has been provided for the decision, notwithstanding the proposed claimant’s repeated requests for same. It is contended that a rolling contract in these circumstances constitutes a type of harassment. Details of any Interested Parties St. Mungo’s, 3 Thomas More Square, Tower Hill, London E1W 1YW The issue Background 1. The proposed claimant and his wife arrived in England from Ireland in August 2003 to make contact with other victims of church abuse with the aim of forming an organisation. They were forced onto state benefits in July 2005 which were then terminated in November 2006, making them street homeless. In July 2009, they were housed in a political ‘safe house’ from which they were evicted in March 2013, forcing them once again into street homelessness. In total they have been forced to live rough on the streets of London for almost four years – from 3 November 2006 to 13 July 2009, and again from 14 April 2013 to 17 May 2014. The proposed claimant has a history of respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis and other lung infections. Since February 2014, as a result of funding from America, both the proposed claimant and his wife have been part-time employed to run Network for Church Monitoring (N4CM), a non-profit organisation the proposed claimant founded in 2011. (Their joint salaries are equivalent to what a couple would get from unemployment benefit.) This nonprofit believes in secular government. Its news website Church and State has 40 Nobel Prize winners on it. 2. The proposed claimant has recently challenged the violation of his rights under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the Internal Covenant on Civil and Procedural Rights by a complaint to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The complaint cites Handyside v. United Kingdom (1976), where the European Court in Strasbourg decides that Article 10 (freedom of speech) of the European Convention on Human Rights is not only applicable to “information” or “ideas” that are favourably received, or regarded as inoffensive, or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that “offend, shock or disturb” the State or any sector of the population. Such 2
are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no “democratic society”. GLA Housing First 3. On 17 May 2014, the proposed claimant and his wife were housed by the Mayor of London’s Housing First programme in a flat owned by Peabody (then called Family Mosaic), with support provided by the Single Homeless Project (SHP). Housing First is an internationally acclaimed programme for entrenched rough sleepers, the core principle of which is the provision of permanent accommodation and non-compulsory support (Johnsen and Teixeira, 2010). The principle is to be found in the Funding Agreement between the GLA and SHP dated 13 March 2014. Schedule 1 provides that: “[C]lients who meet the criteria for a Housing First offer will be offered long term tenancies…. Long term tenancies would mean for a minimum of two years with the possibility to extend and preferably for the lifetime of the client.” 4. GLA Housing First was a pilot project commissioned in March 2012 for a period of 3 years, finishing in March 2015. It is indisputable that when the proposed claimant and his wife came off the streets the second time in May 2014, they were entrenched clients of GLA Housing First with high support needs. Former Mayor of London Boris Johnson states: “Between 2012 and 2015, our Housing First pilot successfully accommodated 40 entrenched clients” (Rough Sleeping Commissioning Framework, 2015, p. 6). Researchers from the University of York confirm that the GLA Housing First pilot “focused on people with high support needs with sustained and recurrent experience of homelessness” (Bretherton and Pleace, 2015, p. 20). 5. The aim of GLA Housing First was to provide small numbers of entrenched rough sleepers in London with stable tenancies in private, social or council housing in circumstances where their support needs may otherwise have excluded them from access to such housing. The housing used for this project came from the Rough Sleeper Initiative (RSI) housing stock managed by the Clearing House. The proposed claimant and his wife spent on furnishings the deposit they had for accommodation, having been informed they had the possibility to extend their tenancy beyond the expiry of the initial term. Their flat came without furnishings save cooker, fridge and carpets. The proposed claimant even had to install shelves that had been removed from the kitchen and replace curtain rails, curtains and net curtains that had been removed from bedroom and living room windows. Clearing House 6. On 4 September 2014, following a decision by the GLA not to extend the Housing First pilot due to lack of funding, SHP wrote to the proposed claimant to inform him for the first time that GLA Housing First was a pilot scheme which would be coming to an end in March 2015. The GLA in Heavey v GLA (2015) stated as follows: It was decided as part of the exit strategy in September 2014 that all Housing First tenants would be referred back to the Clearing House…. In other words, at the end of 3
the Housing First pilot, the tenants would revert to being standard Clearing House tenants and as such would fall to be referred for support to the TST [Tenancy Sustainment Team] like all other Clearing House tenants. (Emphasis added.) 7. The Clearing House model departs significantly from the provisions of Housing First, in that accommodation may not be permanent nor support voluntary. The latter means that the client may be required to comply with holistic support plans. The proposed claimant and his wife were deeply concerned by this turn of events, especially considering the problems they were having with SHP. First, the proposed claimant had received in July 2014 a support plan from SHP that stated in reference to him and his wife that they “appear very grandiose in their thinking” and that “they both demonstrate symptoms of mental ill health”. Second, the proposed claimant discovered that not only had SHP passed this information onto Clearing House, but they had also submitted to the service inaccurate information about him and his wife in relation to their employment status and financial standing. On 8 May 2015, Brooks J. ordered the deletion of all this data from the SHP and Clearing House websites and the payment of damages to the proposed claimant for distress of £750. 8. The proposed claimant repeatedly protested to GLA his and his wife’s openended referral to Clearing House, but to no avail. On 12 August 2015 Lavender J. refused the proposed claimant permission to proceed with his claim for judicial review on the basis that his claim form disclosed no arguable error of law on the part of the GLA, and was mistakenly not filed within three months of SHP’s email of 4 September 2014. The proposed claimant subsequently filed a claim in the Central London County Court against GLA, citing Connors v UK (2004) in saying that the legal framework applying to the referral decision that deprived the proposed claimant of a review did not provide him and his wife with sufficient procedural protection of their rights. On 3 February 2016, Silverman J. ruled that the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case. However, Silverman J. received a commitment from the GLA that round table talks between the proposed claimant and St. Mungo’s would be arranged by the Authority. 9. A subsequent meeting between the proposed claimant, St. Mungo’s CEO Howard Sinclair and Clearing House Manager Kate Moon recognised the individual high support needs of the proposed claimant and his wife. This resulted in a written support agreement that specifies that the proposed claimant and his wife will not be subjected to “assessment” or “support plans” and that their “support is voluntary”. This in turn paved the way for the (like for like) renewal of their fixed term tenancy on 16 May 2016. Ongoing high support needs 10. On 31 October 2014, SHP wrote: “As previously advised, GLA Housing First Pilot will be ending, but it is every agency’s aim that you stay within your current accommodation with the support and service you require” (emphasis added). However, it is evident that St. Mungo’s TST has not provided the proposed claimant with the support and service he requires.
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11. The proposed claimant has repeatedly requested support for volunteering as a befriender with Newham Council’s Active Newham. The proposed claimant was (and remains) so keen for this support that on 27 May 2016 he attended a meeting at St. Mungo’s TST office on the premise that a phone call would be made to Active Newham on his behalf. However, his name was never used during the phone call and he was subsequently forced to file a claim in the Central London County Court in July 2016 to have the case notes from that meeting and an earlier meeting rectified. It took the scheduling of a preliminary hearing in October 2016 to have both case notes rectified as the proposed claimant had requested all along; and that rectification only took place after a failed attempt by an international firm of solicitors, Osborne Clarke, to have the proposed claimant’s claim struck out on the papers. At the preliminary hearing, Thornett J. dismissed St. Mungo’s application to strike out the proposed claimant’s claim for compensation. Avent J’s order dated 11 March 2017 does not state why the claim was dismissed. Despite the proposed claimant’s numerous written requests to St. Mungo’s TST for support, and although his support agreement dictates that case notes are updated, St. Mungo’s TST has not carried out a support review since the second meeting in May 2016. 12. St. Mungo’s has not been the only stumbling block for the proposed claimant and his wife during the last two-year period of their tenancy. These are some examples (by no means exhaustive) that shed light on the harassment and intimidation they have experienced during this period of their tenancy: (i) After receiving a newsletter from Active Newham that sought volunteer befrienders for older or isolated residents in the community, the proposed claimant applied in June 2016 to become a volunteer befriender. In July 2016, following the intervention of his local councillor, he met with three senior officials from Newham Council. It is a matter of written record that the proposed claimant was told at this meeting that he would be informed of the date of the next befriending training session, however this has never happened. He has made several complaints of discrimination against the Council on the matter but to no avail. (ii) Newham Council has twice suspended the proposed claimant’s Housing Benefit following false notifications from the Department for Work and Pensions that he and his wife had vacated. The first notification, in October 2016, triggered a full-blown investigation by Newham Benefits Service. The proposed claimant was interrogated for over an hour and a half before the benefit was de-suspended. The second notification took effect the week before his court hearing against St. Mungo’s on 20 February 2017, and the benefit was only de-suspended the day after the hearing. The proposed claimant hasn’t even been able to secure his address from misconduct by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) staff, despite several high-level complaints related in part to an unauthorised update to his address by HMRC in July 2017. (iii) Facebook has waged a concerted campaign against the Church and State website, which escalated in March 2018 with four blocks against the site for a total of 29 out of 31 days. There have also been 1,191 blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016 due to internal error notifications that render the site inaccessible 5
for generally one or two minutes – a leading web hosting company, SiteGround, is paid $1,000 per year by N4CM Chairman Dr. Stephen D. Mumford to host the site and manage the server. And the proposed claimant and his wife’s home internet access – for which the proposed claimant pays Britain’s leading telecommunications company, British Telecom, £850 per year – has been cut 193 times since 26 May 2017. He has documented communication with BT Executive Level Complaints showing there has been and remains no problem with his phone line, BT hub or wiring. (iv) The proposed claimant’s wife’s Church and State blog has been attacked in various ways: links have been broken and images exchanged, deleted or temporarily removed. So too have the proposed claimant and his wife’s computers. Since September 2017, the internet connection speed on any one of their four laptops has been reduced from anything between 70-74Mbps to 0Mbps, usually disabling the targeted laptop, and for up to three weeks to date. The laptop most targeted for this form of attack is the proposed claimant’s main laptop that cost him £600 in January 2017. The proposed claimant has also amassed irrefutable evidence relating to problems with email and mail (both incoming and outgoing). Most recently, in June 2017, the proposed claimant received £30 in compensation from Royal Mail and an assurance from the Royal Mail Chief Executive’s Office that the actions taken will prevent the mishandling of his and his wife’s incoming mail. St. Mungo’s decision as a type of harassment 13. It is at once evident that the proposed claimant and his wife have ongoing high support needs. Nonetheless, on 10 May 2018, the decision was taken by Clearing House to rule out the re-issue of another tenancy on 16 May 2018 (the last day of their current tenancy). No reason has been provided for the decision, notwithstanding the proposed claimant’s repeated written requests for same. In a matter of five days, and despite numerous written requests to St. Mungo’s TST for support (most recently on 11 May 2018), the proposed claimant and his wife have gone from having stable accommodation to a rolling contract with a two-months’ notice period. It is contended that a rolling contract in these circumstances constitutes a type of harassment. 14. To further exacerbate this horrendous situation, the proposed claimant has been informed by St. Mungo’s TST on behalf of Clearing House that it will be decided on 16 May 2018 to extend his and his wife’s tenancy or move them on. In a witness statement dated 14 September 2016, St. Mungo’s told the County Court that they were "keen to work with Mr. Heavey to ensure that he remains securely housed and does not face homelessness again”. Both the Court and the proposed claimant were unequivocally led to believe that this statement applied to their current accommodation. No reference has ever been made to moving them on, either verbally or in writing, until 10 May 2018; and certainly not to being moved on regardless of whether they are ready or not. On 13 May 2018, the proposed claimant wrote the following in an unacknowledged email to St. Mungo’s CEO Howard Sinclair:
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It is causing me acute emotional distress that I cannot have your assurance: 1) that the re-issue of another tenancy is back on the table, and 2) that my wife and I are not being threatened with a Section 21 Notice to vacate our home (a threat to life). 15. On the St. Mungo’s website there is a report entitled “Clearing House at 25” (2016). It states that St. Mungo’s TST staff work with clients “until they are ready to move on” and further states that “more than half” of the 291 entrenched rough sleepers Clearing House has housed since 2009 are still living in their RSI homes. The proposed claimant's wife, a former psychologist, has managed with great difficulty to obtain two diplomas in social care from Newham College during their current tenancy. She volunteers on Fridays in a local day centre for isolated older and disabled residents. The manager of this day centre recently told her that her work is excellent and that she is considered a valued member of the team. She fully appreciates, however, that she would need the support of St. Mungo’s TST to gain part-time employment as a Health Care Assistant after spending almost four years living rough on the streets of London. The proposed claimant, a former teacher, remains keen to engage with St. Mungo’s TST in order to stand any chance of breaking the befriending blockade that is currently being maintained against him by Newham Council. This would be with a view to training for a second job in the care sector. He currently has two recommendations for care work, one of which is written by a retired American physician, then based in London, who received his MD from Harvard Medical School. Threat to life 16. There is a threat to life in this case considering the following range of factors as applicable: (i) The proposed claimant is in his late fifties and has a history of respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis and other lung infections. During the proposed claimant’s first period of homelessness he was twice hospitalised, once with pneumonia in December 2006 and the second time with a viral infection in October 2007. Near the end of the proposed claimant’s second period of homelessness, on 14 April 2014, he was diagnosed with asthma as well as a chest infection. It is not inconceivable that the proposed claimant does not have the respiratory health to survive even another year or two on the streets. (ii) The proposed claimant has serious concerns about the health care he has or has not received over the years from National Health Service (NHS) England. Prior to the proposed claimant’s hospitalisation with pneumonia in 2006, he lost consciousness whilst vomiting and could have easily died had his wife not been with him. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital discharged him 42 hours after admission still unwell (into the shivering cold and dense fog), placing him at risk. The proposed claimant most recently complained to NHS England about emergency dental treatment he received in January 2018. He complained in part that he had a nerve removed from a tooth but was only prescribed antibiotics after the eruption of the tooth days later. NHS England did not uphold any aspect of his complaint. The tooth itself was extracted a month to the day after the emergency treatment.
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(iii) Back on the streets the proposed claimant and his wife will be restricted to sleeping on night buses, notwithstanding the proposed claimant’s asthma and now increased susceptibility to respiratory disease. They were forced into this predicament prior to coming off the streets the second time because of an excessive use of force by police officers to move them out of where they had been sleeping. This included the proposed claimant’s wife being threatened with arrest on the trumped-up charge of assaulting a police officer (City of London Police PSD reference no. CO/0021/14). Since the subsequent escalation of the migration crisis in Europe, the police have been given more powers to crack down on rough sleeping and need less to resort to excessive force (such as arrest without lawful authority). Details of the action that the defendant is expected to take The proposed claimant requests a review of the decision that is being challenged. ADR proposals The proposed claimant has considered the suggested options in the pre-action protocol for judicial review for resolving disputes without litigation which may be appropriate. The only suggestion which would potentially be appropriate is the option for ‘Discussion and negotiation’ (which is proposed). Details of any information sought None. Details of any documents that are considered relevant and necessary None. Address for reply and service of court documents As on this letter head. Proposed reply date The proposed claimant asks that you provide a substantive reply to this letter within the standard 14 day protocol period, that is by Tuesday, 29 May 2018.
Declan Heavey 15 May 2018
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