Council also entices local officials with a ‘cash prize’ and ‘award plaques’ for the best preventive measures adopted by local government units against professional squatters. 80 It is clearly not acceptable as a matter of policy to encourage local government officials to commit acts which constitute violations of international human right standards. Finally, it should be noted that the legislative and regulatory provisions concerned with ‘professional squatters’, ‘squatting syndicates’ and ‘squatting’ generally, employ language that is at times incendiary and unnecessarily emotive. Describing such persons as ‘intruders’, ‘nefarious’, and indeed as ‘squatters’, serves to alienate them further and discourage their participation in governance processes with respect to housing. That the law proscribes the category of persons (‘professional squatters’) and not the act of professional squatting reinforces this alienation, penalising the individual, rather than the conduct. To comply with the international standards on housing and evictions the use and application of the terms ‘professional squatters’ and ‘squatting syndicates’ should be entirely overhauled. Although the application as it currently exists under Philippine law is inconsistent with those standards, it is not inconsistent to exclude categories of persons from government subsidised housing on the basis of their capacity to pay for adequate housing with their own income. However, this should be accomplished in the following fashion to ensure compliance with international human rights law: 80 i. Most importantly, the law should be clear as to who is eligible for government support in the pursuit of adequate housing. The UDHA already employs tests through sections 3(t) and 16 to only provide assistance to those families whose household income ‘falls within the poverty threshold as defined by the National Economic and Development Authority’ (NEDA) and who do not own any real property. Testing the actual income of the urban poor is indeed a difficult exercise. To ensure precision in the determination of social housing eligibility, the IRRs could perhaps devise a more detailed description of how household income is determined. This test could include, in addition to household income, value of assets, debt obligations, and other such indicia of spending capacity. Any test should also specify any intervals at which eligibility, and household income, should be assessed. Household incomes fluctuate according to a variety of factors, which means that an ineligible household in one month might be eligible for social housing programmes the next due to a fluctuation in their income. This variability should also be reflected in the way in which eligibility for housing is assessed, by excluding eligibility for a fixed period and then permitting a household to reapply for a housing subsidy, for example. ii. The law should only penalise people for the act of ‘professional squatting’ once it is clearly determined that they have, and that they are aware that they have, more income than the eligibility threshold for housing support. The poverty threshold as determined by NEDA, by which eligibility for See: Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council, National Drive Against Professional Squatters and Squatting Syndicates, “Best LGU Practices for 2013”, available at <http://www.hudcc.gov.ph/ProgramProject.aspx?name=NDAPSSS>. 45