Time-mapping the criminalisation of illegal eviction as an example of protective social welfare legislation in England and Wales

In this article we focus on a longstanding example of protective legislation, the criminalisation of landlords who illegally evict or harass their tenants. Illegal eviction was first criminalised in 1964 and then consolidated in the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 which, in an amended form, continues to provide the substance of protections from landlord criminal activity for rental occupiers. Using this example we argue first that the failures of comparative social welfare scholars to integrate protective legislation into their analysis has led to overly generalised characterisations of welfare systems and second that housing scholarship’s focus on security of tenure has largely ignored the radical character of these criminal offences to the detriment of precariously housed households. The article uses time-mapping as a tool to place the criminalisation of landlords within a broader social, economic and political terrain to help understand how it was possible that property owners could be criminalised in relation to their own property, and to illustrate the complexity of and fluidity changes in welfare provision.