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ARTICLE · 24 FEBRUARY 1995

What's In Store For Squatters?

United KingdomFinance and Banking
Jim Cotter of the Property Litigation Department of commercial lawyers Nabarro Nathanson looks at the problems facing retailers regarding squatters and how the new Criminal Justice Act makes squatting a criminal offence.

Commercial squatters clearly consider that they have little to fear from civil law remedies for trespass. Shortly however, commercial squatting will be a criminal offence. How will "the Christmas paper and novelties brigade" react?

Christmas present for lawyers

While I am no Nostradamus, if there is one prediction I have been able to make with confidence in past years, it is that I will receive instructions from at least one angry, frustrated and dispossessed landowner, shortly before Christmas. Commercial squatting does of course happen at other times of the year but, for obvious reasons, the month or two before Christmas are the most active for the nomadic vendors of Christmas paper and novelties.

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