Like so much else in life, my involvement in housing law emerged from a mix of the personal and the political. My first article for LAG was in March 1974, on exemplary damages in eviction cases: I derived the material from research I was doing for my pupil master, the ultimate radical lawyer Tony Gifford (then as now Lord Gifford; but not yet then Lord Gifford QC), for a case he was working on, but the idea to turn it into an article was neither his nor my own; rather, it was that of a close friend, the energetic and inimitable Clive Morrick, then Assistant Director of the relatively newly-formed Legal Action Group and editor of what was known as the LAG Bulletin. With the bit between my teeth, and a few pounds in my pocket (at a time when, as a pupil, I was earning nothing), I followed it up with ‘Service Tenancies and Service Occupancies’ in the May 1974 Bulletin and, in July 1974, with what became one of my best-known articles for many years, ‘Tenant or Licensee’.

These articles – and others before them by writers such as Jeremy Smith and Dawn Oliver – were listed in the Bulletin under the heading ‘Housing’, rather than ‘Landlord and Tenant’: I am sometimes credited with the formulation of housing law but use of the term by LAG preceded my involvement with the subject. The reality is again a mix: lawyers – legal aid lawyers, but especially those in the newly-founded Law Centres – were dealing with housing cases often more than any other; they wanted material that directly addressed the issues that concerned their clients and were tired of trying to dig the answers out of analysis in Woodfall or Hill & Redman directed far more to business and agricultural lettings than to residential accommodation.

This shift to a practical emphasis was not only to be found on the ground but began to be reflected in the courts: in Woodward v Docherty [1974] 1 WLR 966, the Court of Appeal analysed whether accommodation was furnished and thus outside of security of tenure under the Rent Act 1968 by reference – among other matters – to the real cost of the sort of shoddy, second-hand furniture to which occupiers of bedsitting rooms and flats were accustomed as well as, critically, to the value to the landlord not in the return on the investment but in keeping tenants out of security. In short order, Woodward v Docherty was followed by the Rent Act 1974 which substituted the resident landlord for the furnished tenancy: while of course there have been attempts to abuse the exemption, the reality is that it served to settle down that much of the law, largely because it turned on real factual conditions rather than those which were susceptible to easy manipulation. The new law has rarely led to decisions which are at odds either with the parliamentary intention or, more centrally for my point here, with common sense and experience.

Housing law as we have come to know it was, I believe, a product of its times: increased use of legal aid; wider access to education brought in a class of lawyers from a wider background; social attitudes, too, were changing – we are talking about the early 1970s, following the seminal, game-changing 1960s; many people wanted more from their lawyers, and many lawyers wanted to provide it.

It was my work for LAG writing about housing law which directly led to an approach from the leading legal publishers Sweet & Maxwell who commissioned twin handbooks from myself (Housing: Security and Rent Control) and Tom Hadden, a lecturer at Belfast University (Housing: Repairs and Improvements). My book went on in the next edition to cover the subject as a whole, under the name the Manual of Housing Law – it is now in its 11th edition and, after some years with S&M, has reconnected with its roots at LAG and with its companion works, what are now Homelessness and Allocations (in its 12th edition) and Quiet Enjoyment: Protection from Rogue Landlords (in its 8th edition) which have been with LAG all along. I was also invited by S&M to take over the Encyclopedia of Housing Law and Practice and restructure it to reflect the new approach to what housing law as a subject meant – all that law which governed how people occupied property as a home. The subject was given much-needed intellectual discipline by the highly-regarded academic, Martin Partington, now Professor Martin Partington CBE, QC (Hon), with whom I had worked on the first edition of Quiet Enjoyment and with whom I was privileged to write the textbook – now a loose-leaf – Arden & Partington’s Housing Law, likewise published by S&M, who went on to lead the Law Commission’s work on the reform of housing law, as well as by the late David Hoath, author of Council Housing (later Public Housing Law) and Homelessness, both S&M ; it was also given immeasurable support from the mid-1980s by Caroline Hunter, now Professor of Law at York University, with whom I wrote at one time or another on all the works I was responsible for. And, in around 1982, S&M took over the Housing Law Reports, which I had earlier been invited to establish by a little-known firm in legal publishing, George Godwin & Co. All it needed was the Journal of Housing Law, which S&M started to publish in 1997.

The LAG connection was the source of all of this: its right to call housing law its own is indisputable, although it is also right to recognise the enormous input from S&M, the adoption of the subject by whom added a real degree of formal (perhaps I mean establishment) recognition or validation, especially in LAG’s very earliest days before it had established its own standing and the widespread credibility it now enjoys.

For some years, I was not only contributing housing law articles to LAG on core issues such as statutory residence, joint tenancy, board and attendance, subtenancies, premiums, distress for rent, possession orders, harassment and illegal eviction and homelessness, in a sense helping to build the subject brick by brick, but was also formally Housing Consultant to the Group and to the Bulletin. I stepped down from that rôle – and from routinely writing for the Bulletin – in around 1980 or 1981 because I believed then, as I continue to believe, that a plurality of views is important to the development of the subject; it goes without saying to the reader of what is now Legal Action that this was provided, above all, by the writing partners Jan Luba (later Jan Luba QC, now His Honour Judge Luba QC) and Nic Madge, formerly a solicitor at Camden Law Centre, then a District Judge, finally a Circuit Judge, primarily through their indispensable Recent Developments column.

They, too, used the LAG rôle as a launch pad for other books, including the standard practitioner texts Defending Possession Proceedings (now in its 9th edition) and what is now called Housing Conditions: Tenants’ Rights (now in its 6th edition), together with the Housing Law Casebook (now in its 7th edition), all published by LAG and Housing Allocation & Homelessness (now in its 6th edition), published by LexisNexis, to the 1st and 2nd editions of which, by Jan and Liz Davies (now Liz Davies QC) I extended a warm welcome in the Preface to the 8th edition of Homelessness and Allocations, in terms that may be worth repeating.

There are other works on housing law which have contributed to that plurality, which the subject (not just homelessness) merits, published neither by myself nor Jan and our various co-authors, but focusing on these alone tells the tale of a subject which has spread itself across legal publishing and come to maturity: again, it is a maturity that was fostered and continues to be nurtured by LAG, as witness its amazing housing law library, to much but not all of which I have referred above.

Legal literature is not, however, an end in itself. Our legal system is extensively influenced, if not dominated, by the way in which cases are decided in court, ultimately in the Supreme Court: given the exclusive right of the courts to interpret legislation and their rôle in relation to the protection and development of the common law, that is necessarily so. There is, however, much that may be criticised about our approach to cases: in particular, unlike some other jurisdictions which allow the admission of a wide range of material designed to set issues in their real life context, our approach largely remains narrowly focused on the facts of each case addressed in oral argument, with written materials considered secondary (and sometimes seemingly barely considered at all). True, the Human Rights Act 1998 saw some broadening out of material in some areas, but it is not the norm and, with the retrenchment of legal aid and the encroachment of narrower, post-Brexit attitudes, it may even be in retreat.

In the absence of the wider approach, specialism goes some way towards the same end. For a fairly long stretch, housing law benefitted from this, with judges who emerged from the same times and attitudes as LAG and the development of housing law, as I referred to it above, rising ever higher with the passage of time. As a subject, housing law did for a while seem to achieve its goal with courts ceasing to approach residential issues as if they were commercial agreements between equal parties; rather, the courts, and in particular the higher courts – up to and including the highest – displayed a real awareness of the practical issues and interests in housing and a commitment to determine cases in the way they thought advanced all its users.

I don’t think that commitment is there in the higher courts today: to the contrary, I sense a very real reversion (if I may be forgiven the pun) in those courts to uninformed decision-making, at best interpreting legislation in a vacuum and at worst designed to achieve the pre-determined results of judges who do not have the experience and insight into ‘real life’ that was the hallmark of the likes of – say – Lady Hale, Lord Neuberger, Lord Hope or Lord Carnwath. We are, I fear, drifting back to the days when the oral tradition, unsupported by a wider sense of subject, allowed advocates to advance assertions without any basis in reality. It is a trend which I believe all housing lawyers should combine to resist, by deploying their knowledge of the subject and – above all – its context, no matter for whom they appear, denying themselves the indulgence of hyperbole, embellishment and exaggeration designed to harness the ignorance or engage the prejudices of tribunals through populist representations, fantasy policies and phantom purposes.