Rent arrears management practices in the housing association sector

had increased or decreased in their use of
the courts; one had decreased considerably, the
other had increased, both of which were partly
due to changed approaches . District Judges
were generally said to be tenant friendly, although
their heterogeneous approaches were also
remarked upon .
HA use of Ground 8 was said to be generally
as a last resort, but different HAs had different
approaches to its use . What was also notable was
that all HAs which used Ground 8 said that their
rent arrears management would not be overly
affected by its withdrawal .
Duty advisors commented on the increasing use
of Ground 8 in courts used by HA A-C and the
unwillingness of some HAs and some of their
officers to negotiate before the hearing . All advisors
appreciated that District Judges were more willing
to side with the tenant, but believed that presenting
housing officers were adversely affected by their
lack of knowledge of law and procedure . There
were also concerns expressed that HAs were
paying lip service to the PAP and were not making
early enough interventions .
88
6.1 Chapter background
and scope
This chapter reports on six case study HAs
conducted during May-July 2009 . Case study work
focused on a small number of HAs enabling us to
“drill down” from the emerging findings to explore
the “how”, “why” and “in what circumstances”
questions . It was apparent from our earlier work
and the heterogeneity of the domain that various
broad and institutional contextual factors were
likely to be in play in both collective and individual
decision-making over possessions . Further, whilst
we were unable to obtain the requisite consents
for empirical work with courts within the timeframe
of the research project, case study HAs as an
alternative could be directed at questions about
court processes and actions from the “sharp end” of
practice . This case study work was supplemented
with, and counterbalanced by, a small number of
interviews with those managing or acting in court
duty advice schemes, which roughly overlapped
with the case study areas . Reference is also made
in this chapter to material derived from one further
interview with a national RSL (a relatively high user
of Ground 8) and which was conducted during
this phase of the research using the case study
topic guide .