Laws that lock you out

If you are in the ranks of the unqualified, you are likely to pay more for your rented home and live in some of the lowest-quality accommodation available.

And because the law denies you a lease, you can be thrown out onto the street with no notice.

For immigrants – and indeed for many in the seemingly greener pastures of the qualified sector – the housing laws are unfair.

However, they are held up to be a necessary tool to protect Jersey from unmanageable immigration and to help ‘local’ people find a home in one of the most expensive places to live in the world.

For those in £100-plus a week bedsits, human rights laws hold out a ray of hope that the system can be beaten.

That hope surfaced again last week when estate agent Roger Trower suggested that the States would lose a court challenge to quallies.

His comments came after Housing Minister Terry Le Main was pressured by States Members into revoking and shelving a decision to make the system fairer by allowing J-cats to buy or rent what they liked. They had previously been limited to buying houses worth more than £250,000 and more than two years old.

Mr Trower said that politicians did not understand the issues and suggested that they would soon face an unwinnable challenge in the human rights courts.

But is Mr Trower, a man not shy of headline-grabbing comments, barking up the wrong tree?

Certainly, the Population Office is content that the law is human rights compliant.

To win a case under human rights law, complainants must first establish that their grievance can be addressed under the convention.

The convention does not list a home as a human right. However, it does include a right to private and family life and it is likely to be under this article that a challenge to the housing law would be made. A lawyer might argue that housing laws prevent the enjoyment of an adequate private or family life.

If this argument was successful, complainants would then have to establish that they had been discriminated against on grounds as set out in the convention, which include sex, race, colour or birth.

They would no doubt highlight the fact that non-locally born Islanders have to wait 11 years to be qualified against the local ten.

But even if complainants satisfied these twin requirements of the law, the human rights law says that such contraventions can be allowed if proportionate in a local context.

With Jersey’s shortage of housing and prices as they are, that is a case the Population Office is satisfied it could make – especially as the qualification period for immigrants is gradually being brought towards ten years.

Ultimately, it is only when a case is taken to court that legal opinion can be replaced with a definite ruling. The only precedent we have is from 30 years ago, when the European court said that Jersey’s housing rules were lawful.

Whether that continues to be the position remains to be seen.