Interesting shameless British law!
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As someone who works in the Property Industry I can add that this is the law, however there is also no law forbidding a homeowner to re-enter the property and remove them. Just bring a locksmith, and once in, change the locks, they then have no squatters rights, however you may want to bring several of your larger, more muscle-bound friends with you.
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I've heard that the property located at 10 Downing St in London is a nice place and the current resident is absent every so often ;)
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Nope! according to the lawyers and court officials who came to the show to confirm what LBC 97.3 said. The lawyer even said there was one case where the squatters broke in, and the owner went to call police, and when the police arrive these squatters said that the house was already broken in by some one else, and they even say a guy running away. Then since this house was open anyway, they came in, and exercised the Squatters rights. The police simply said they could not do anything, and asked the owner to prove that it was the squatters who broke in to the house, and then they will take action, not otherwise. If they are legally using Squatter's rights, they will have to be evicted only by court, and the police walked away.
code_wiz wrote:
Nope! according to the lawyers and court officials who came to the show to confirm what LBC 97.3 said.The lawyer even said there was one case where the squatters broke in, and the owner went to call police, and when the police arrive these squatters said that the house was already broken in by some one else, and they even say a guy running away.Then since this house was open anyway, they came in, and exercised the Squatters rights. The police simply said they could not do anything, and asked the owner to prove that it was the squatters who broke in to the house, and then they will take action, not otherwise.If they are legally using Squatter's rights, they will have to be evicted only by court, and the police walked away.
This is patently not true. For one thing, there is no such thing as "squatters' rights"; you are talking of the laws of adverse possession. For adverse possession to be legal, the land has to be "abandoned" (and there is, of course, a legal definition of the term). The simplest way to remove squatters is to give them permission to stay, because the laws of adverse possession are not applied if the possessor has or has had permission to stay on the land -- so write a note, saying "I give you full and free permission to stay in the property until 3pm", and then you can get the police to kick them out at 3:01pm. I love it when people get hysterical about something that they don't understand, and then assume that no-one else in the world has ever given intelligent thought to it.
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