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Meric Apak (centre) with fellow campaigners rally support against sales of council homes in Camden Town on Saturday |
‘Selling our homes is a disgrace’
IT’S morally wrong. Clear and to the point, that was the judgment of a Camden Town woman who yesterday (Wednesday) watched in horror as the council flat in the basement of her converted house was sized up and earmarked for sale on the private market.
“All it needs is a bit of cleaning,” she said. “Are you telling me that there isn’t somebody on the waiting list for homes who wouldn’t be crying out for this? It is completely and utterly and morally wrong.”
The flat, even more coveted because it has been converted for the potential needs of disabled residents, will go into a pool of hundreds of homes due to be sold.
As pictured on our front page, six more council homes were lost to private hands forever on Thursday as developers leapt at the chance to pick up a bargain at auction.
Property, originally acquired by the council to help those most in need, slipped out of the council’s portfolio with the rat-a-tat of an auctioneer’s gavel in a function room in Piccadilly.
A flat on an estate in Cromer Street, King’s Cross, was sold for £250,000, a house in Messina Avenue, West Hampstead, for £685,000. There is no mechanism for the council to claw them back into council-owned stock.
In all, the council raised £2.6million from its afternoon of business, which could be seen as a tidy sum if the Town Hall was a commercially minded private developer but represents only a drop in the overall budgets handled by local authorities each year.
Justified or not, some close observers fear the money raised will be hoovered up by council bureaucracy and cynics wonder if every single penny will be reinvested without waste.
Certainly, this controversial way of raising money means there is more pressure on housing chiefs to spend it wisely and, as the New Journal revealed last week, there is concern among some tenants that this hasn’t been the case so far. Complaints that improvements to people’s homes have amounted to little more than three rows of tiling in a bathroom and low-level wiring in kitchen sockets.
The Town Hall pleads poverty when asked why it is not doing more.
Despite the huge waiting list for council homes, sales like the auction witnessed by the New Journal have been taking place over several months but the speed of the sell-off is gathering such a pace that alarmed tenants’ leaders want the process to be immediately suspended.
Larraine Revah, chairwoman of Gospel Oak District Management Committee, said the Town Hall would “never have a mandate” to sell off homes.
Three days after the latest batch of council homes were sold, members of Camden’s Federation of Tenants and Residents Association ramped up the opposition by challenging every elected councillor with a five yes-or-no question survey, ultimately asking them whether they agreed with the principle of shedding homes from the council’s stock. Hardly a time-consuming request, four days later they are still waiting for all councillors to respond.
There are still a couple of days before the publication of those who did but the New Journal understands that not one Liberal Democrat among their 23-member group has replied with anything other than the party line.
And with the whiff of a whipped party line, none of the group has so far supported the suspension of sales on ideological grounds, meaning every single Lib Dem councillor will effectively go into next May’s boroughwide elections advocating the controversial policy.
Lib Dem housing chief Councillor Chris Naylor said he had supported council funding for the Camden Fed and that it was the organisation’s job to “tell us what tenants think”. But he said the Camden Fed survey was “not helpful” as it did not offer the opportunity to give longer answers.
He confirmed that, while there was a “range of views” among tenants, no Lib Dem councillor in Camden held the view that councils should hold onto all their homes whatever adverse conditions they faced.
“Nobody wants to sell council homes or put them up for rent on the private market but in the absence of other funding, it is the path we have taken,” he said. “Brent and Westminster have 100 per cent of their homes reaching the decent homes standards but we are only at 50 per cent. We can’t continue with a situation where people are waking up in homes that don’t meet basic standards.”
With dozens of tenants’ leaders arguing money for improvement should come from government funding and not from property sales, he insisted the Town Hall was at the forefront of negotiations but said the council could “not sit on its hands and wait”.
“Daily calls” to government that weren’t answered have been replaced by “conversations”, Cllr Naylor said. The talking, however, hasn’t been fast enough to save homes now in the hands of developers.
Going once, going twice... gone forever
HUNDREDS of property speculators and developers filled a hot and sweaty auction house on Thursday as seven more Camden Council homes went under the hammer.
Unlike the previous auction, in February, the Piccadilly headquarters of the British Academy of Film Television Awards (Bafta) was packed with several bidders competing for each of the properties. Auctioneer Chris McHugh said: “It was a terrific sale. The Camden homes went for big money. There has been a real pick-up in the market. People are starting to put it in property again.”
Houses and maisonettes near leafy Hampstead Heath and in plush West Hampstead were sold to private developers, raising more than £2.6million for the Town Hall.
The council homes sold were:
• £685,000 for the freehold to a three-storey house in Messina Avenue, West Hampstead.
• £440,000 for the freehold to a two-storey house in Chester Road, Dartmouth Park.
• £690,000 for the freehold to a three-storey house in Iverson Road, West Hampstead.
• £233,000 for a leasehold to a ground-floor flat in Hemstal Road, West Hampstead.
• £330,000 a ground-floor terrace shop in Southampton Road, Kentish Town.
• £250,000 for a top-floor flat in Cromer Street, King’s Cross.
A Camden Council owned former cemetery caretaker’s cottage, in East Finchley, did not reach its reserve price for the second auction running.
The next auction is on July 6 at Bafta’s headquarters in Piccadilly. |
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