The Machinery of Eviction: Bailiffs, Power, Resistance, and Eviction Enforcement Practices in England and Wales ! Alexander George Baker ! Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Newcastle University January 2017 Abstract This thesis addresses a significant research gap in critical research on forced eviction. It attempts to shift focus from the experiences of the evicted, examined in previous studies, to the work of evictors and eviction enforcement. It asks how the ‘tools, technologies, strategies, and tactics’ of forced eviction develop and are implemented in England and Wales. Using qualitative interviews centred around a case study of a city in the North of England to examine the ‘everyday’ form of evictions, this thesis looks at the work of a Rent Arrears Recovery Team on the ‘Benford’ housing estate in the city, and the working lives of County Court Bailiffs at the local court as they work in the context of a national ‘housing crisis’. Interviews with third party organizations and a High Court Enforcement firm, video footage, and online accounts of large-scale evictions provided by a wide range of sources from social movements are used to explore the ‘exceptional’ forms of displacement that emerge on a national scale. This research shows that Eviction enforcement actors and specialists have to employ forms of coercion which exist on a continuum between the ‘emotional’ and the ‘physical’; these practices are underpinned by ‘intuitive’ tactics built through individual and personal histories and the historical context in which evictions take place. These strategies and tactics of eviction are shaped by the resistance of the evicted, and the development of the disciplinary institutions of eviction happens in response to this resistance, which sets the pace for the development of the capacity of the state and economy to displace. This points to a need for more work critiquing the disciplinary institutions of forced eviction, and the global economy of eviction enforcement. i ii Acknowledgements It is customary to thank those nearest and dearest to you first. Therefore I wish to thank my parents and family first and foremost. This research was made possible by Economic and Social Research Council Grant 1188490. I am grateful for the support of the ESRC and the North East Doctoral Training Centre. All interviewees’ contributions are of course invaluable to me for their time and contribution: HM Courts and Tribunals Service and the Ministry of Justice are thanked for their assistance, as are Advisory Service for Squatters and the Radical Housing Network, and The Citizens Advice Bureau. I especially want to acknowledge the contribution of the members of the housing and enforcement sector who are quoted in this thesis. My findings are critical of their work - I believe that is my task as a researcher - but I also respect these participants as individuals for taking the risk of giving interviews to someone they barely knew, and who is going to pick apart the minutiae of our conversations over the course of everything that follows. Represented here are the individuals who were willing to talk when many others preferred to stay quiet - that speaks to their professionalism and conviction in the work they do. The SAPL department members who assisted this thesis in some knowing or unknowing way include: Jane Midgley, David Webb, Paul Cowie, Cat Button, Konrad Miciukiewicz, my annual progress review team, and John Pendlebury for reassurance in his role as Head of Department during a scary first month. Marian Kyte deserves special praise for being an excellent PGR secretary. The Cities and Security Reading Group also contributed many ideas to this thesis for which I am grateful. All workers in administrative, cleaning, maintenance, technical, and catering roles at Newcastle University - this labour makes all of our research possible. The teaching staff at Nottingham, including the members of the CSSGJ. Tony Burns and Colin Wright at Nottingham wrote my flattering references during my application for the course and funding, without which this wouldn’t have taken place. Thanks go to all the scholars who have shaped and organised various seminars, conferences, conversations and publications that had an impact on this thesis: Colin McFarlane, Joe Deville, Katherine Brickell, Melissa Fernandez, Ashok Kumar, Adam Elliott Cooper, Alex Jeffrey, Amber Murrey, Hannah Schling, Gloria Dawson, Julia Heslop, Emma Ormerod, Mara Ferreri, Michele Lancione and Sophie Lewis. iii Thanks also to those in Newcastle and beyond who supported me and provided friendship (in no particular order): Gemma, Matt, Cahir, Paul, Maria, John, Ben, Vicky, Dan and Adam. Those at Nottingham including but not limited to Josh Bowsher, Ed Knock, Olivia Hellewell, Sam Walton, Hich Yezza, Sara Motta, Sofia Mason, Remi Fox-Novak and Andy Parkinson. And all those friends in Otttawa in 2008-2009. There are also numerous souls whose contributions on an individual topic helped shape my ideas regarding it (even if I haven’t taken a word of what they said on board): Alex Worrad-Andrews for neoliberalism, Dan Hancox on gentrification and displacement, Eloise Harding for discussions of environmental movements, Marie Thompson for discussions of affect.. Those artists who kept my spirits up while writing this: Octavia Butler, Marguerite Yourcenar, Ursula Le Guin, Half Man Half Biscuit, Sun Ra, Electrelane, all the musicians on Constellation Records, Parton, Oram, Kassia, and Cunkerdale. Podcasters Scott Carrier for Home of the Brave, Mike Duncan for Rome and Revolutions podcasts (even if his account of history is whiggish), and Joanna Graham, Kefin Mahon, Adam Bibilo and Billy Keable on wrestling. The various figures from contemporary pro wrestling whose first names I plundered for easily memorisable pseudonyms. Any similarity between these figures and their namesakes below is entirely coincidental. Those whose friendship and material support throughout the whole duration made this thesis possible through everything from food to hugs to advice to shelter and whose contributions cannot be simply siphoned off into a single category include: David Bell, Marie Thompson, Sophie and Petra, Alex and Tamsin Worrad-Andrews, and Jim Higginson and Marika Rose for their support; Marika especially provided support of films, food and friendship during a distressing writing process. Alex Vasudevan deserves special mention for being a support, friend, and exemplary activist-geographer. I would also like to thank the various cats kept by friends, neighbours, pubs and strangers. I wish to thank above all my supervisory team of Stephen Graham and Andrew Donaldson. Both overcame their fair share of obstacles to help with this thesis. Many PhD students talk about being terrified of upcoming supervision meetings. I have, fortunately, never had this experience and it speaks to their abilities as supervisors that I have always come out of supervisory meetings feeling positive about my work. During writing this thesis I moved house 5 times, and paid (not including deposits and letting fees) over 12,000 pounds in rent, roughly the equivalent of one year of my iv stipend. Two friends lost their family homes to mortgage repossessions, many more had to move due to rent increases. While one cannot step in the same river twice, one can surely object to the sudden damming of the flow, and the slow erasure of these little worlds of the home has been softened only by the constant struggle against it. I finally thank all those who lend their hands to that struggle. v vi Contents Introduction The Significance of Eviction p.1 Investigating the Technologies of Eviction p.4 Plan of the Present Work p.6 Part 1: Literature Review Chapter 1: Reviewing the Literature p.10 1.1 The Writing of Forced Eviction p.10 1.1.1 What is (Forced) Eviction? p.11 1.1.2 The Functions of Eviction p.13 1.2 Eviction and Capitalism p.14 1.2.1 Primitive Accumulation and Accumulation by Dispossession p.14 1.2.2 Accumulation by Dispossession and the Makings of the ‘Great Housing Crisis’ p.16 1.2.3 Rent and Gentrification p.19 1.2.4 Eviction Economics p.21 1.3 Eviction and The Power of the State p.22 1.3.1 Property Claims and the State p.23 1.3.2 Eviction and Abjection in Neoliberal Britain p.27 1.3.3 Territorial Stigma and Low Income Housing p.28 1.3.4 Travellers and Eviction p.30 1.3.5 Squatting and Political Protest p.32 1.3.6 The Public Nature of Private Property p.36 1.4 Eviction and The Loss of Home p.36 1.4.1 Ending the Home: ‘Domicide’ and ‘Home UnMaking’ p.37 1.4.2 The Politics of Home: Power, feeling and Social Reproduction p.39 1.4.3 The Crisis of Social Reproduction in the UK p.42 1.4.4 Domicide Remade p.44 vii 1. 5 ‘Unmasking’ Eviction p.45 Part 2: Critique and Method Chapter 2: Coercion and Emotion p.48 2.1 Tools and Technologies, Strategies and Tactics p.48 2.2 The State, Power and Coercion p.49 2.2.1 The State and Coercion p.50 2.2.2 The Growth of the Neoliberal State p.52 2.2.3 The Enactment of Technologies p.56 2.3 Street Level Bureaucracies and Coercive Labour p.56 2.3.1 Routine, Violence and Coercion p.58 2.4 Emotional Labour and Affective Power p.60 2.5 The Politics of Resistance p.65 2.6 The State, Power, Resistance p.69 Chapter 3: Methodology p.71 3.1 Answering the Questions p. 71 3.2 The Method p.72 3.2.1 Why a Comparative Case Study? p.72 3.2.2 Unit of Analysis p.75 3.2.3 Comparative Geographies p.78 3.2.4 Linking the Data to the