Oh, and re: squatting, I have a story. Admittedly, this is from some years ago, so I don't know how the law has changed since then, but it's not all media hysteria, and the law certainly used to allow for some life-ruining anomalies (I assume they are anomalies anyway).
My father used to own a small business, about 30 years ago. What he'd do is, with my mother, collect people's (clean) clothes, take them home, iron them, take them back out to them on hangers and charge them. Effectively it was an ironing service with courier'ing. My father did the picking up and delivering, and my mother did most of the ironing. Eventually the business got larger and larger and they hired a few more people to help out with the ironing, and the deliveries and collections went from a few days a week to all day, every day, including at weekends. As the service continued to grow still, they bought a laundrette, and then another, and then another. The laundrettes all had flats above them, which were rented out by the business. In one such flat, one of the staff at the laundrette downstairs rented it, and she had a good relationship with my parents. Her boyfriend ended up moving in too, and whilst he wasn't in the tennancy, they shared the flat and the rent was always paid on time. This continued on for about five years, at which point the woman in question amicably left the business and decided to move out, to move away from London.
Unfortunately, she also split up with her boyfriend at this point - who then refused to move out. He was basically a waste of space - he has no job or income. Unfortunately, because he had been living in the property for a number of years without paying for it, and it was not the business owners primary home, they couldn't immediately force him to leave due to squatting rights. They ended up taking him to court, where he had a lawyer provided to him by the government, owing to him having no money himself. The cost of fighting this legal battle took a large toll on my parents. The squatters lawyer did everything he could not to win the case, but to delay it long enough that my parents would be starved of funds. This happened after a year or two of the man still living in their property, rent free. At this point, my parents threw in the towel as they could no longer afford the large costs of the legal fees combined with the lack of rent from the property (on which they were still paying a mortgage). As a final slap in the face, as the couple were deemed to have "lost" by dropping the case, the cost of the defendents legal fees were then thrust upon them. This final blow caused them to declare bankruptcy. All of this time, they'd been following the advice of their own lawyers - and in the end, this one man's actions caused them to lose not only their three laundrettes, but their home too, where they had two young children - my brother and I. We were forced to move into a much smaller home and rent, as their bankruptcy meant they couldn't get a mortgage (and, frankly, their now severely diminished income meant they could scarcely afford one anyway).
Despite all this, I have a great deal of sympathy with squatters. My point, I guess, is that just because someone is using the law to stay somewhere that is not someone else's primary resident, doesn't mean it's all hunky dory, and it really can ruin lives.
