The governing Social Democrats and the right-wing opposition party Liberal Alliance both want it to be easier for public housing associations to terminate the contracts of tenants who have been convicted of crimes.

Both parties were involved in a 2018 political agreement which was supposed to make it easier and faster for public housing associations (boligforeninger in Danish) to evict convicted criminals as well as their families.

However, it remains difficult in practice for the housing associations to do this, newspaper Jyllands-Posten reported on Saturday.

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Specifically, the two parties are calling for an obligation for police to inform the housing associations if a tenant receives a conviction for which they can legally be evicted.

“We are very much in favour of hard criminals having no leeway in housing areas. We would like to see the process become automated, so the housing associations are notified,” Social Democratic acting housing spokesperson Maria Durhuus said.

A second issue that the parties want resolved is the use of unknown addresses, whereby an individual lives with their family but is registered as having no known address. This makes it harder to evict them under the existing rules.

“If you put up criminals, you are leaving the [societal] community. So we want this loophole to be looked at. It could be based on the person in question having been arrested at the address on a number of occasions,” Durhuus said.

Liberal Alliance also wants the housing association to have the power to cancel a tenancy if the individual in question does not formally reside at the address.

“If you can prove that the person de facto lives there, it should be possible to throw them out. When people deliberately skirt the rules, reality should win out,” housing spokesperson Carl Andersen said.

Andersen added that Liberal Alliance “had not set a position” on whether police should be given additional duties to inform housing associations.