In the 1990s, SQUASH was formed in London to represent the interests of squatters in the debates over the legislation which later became the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
[3] SQUASH gave a parliamentary briefing alongside the Advisory Service for Squatters, homelessness charity Crisis and the Empty Homes Agency.
The Ministry of Justice announced it would take a "qualitative rather than a quantitative" approach to the responses and in October 2011 recommended the criminalisation of squatting in residential buildings.
[5] In August 2012, SQUASH stated to the BBC that the number of people on local authority housing lists had almost doubled since 1997 to 5 million.
[8] When squatting was threatened with criminalisation in the 1970s, the pro-squatting group CACTL (Campaign Against the Criminal Trespass Law) made powerful links with workers movements.
Legal scholar Lucy Finchett-Maddock suggests SQUASH could have made better links with the contemporaneous student and Occupy movements.
[9] Securitization scholar Mary Manjikian states that anarchist squatters criticised SQUASH for engaging with the Government's proposals rather than ignoring them.