One Housing Group cash in on Upper Holloway care home

Published: 25 June, 2010
by TOM FOOT

ONE of the country’s biggest housing groups is cashing-in on a former care home in Upper Holloway.

One Housing Group (OHG) – which receives massive funding from the government to provide affordable housing – said the cost of refurbishing its building in Kiver Road was “too high to warrant keeping it”, and it will be sold at auction in two weeks’ time.

The 1990s six-bedroom semi-detached house, which is valued at £420,000, housed vulnerable tenants with “physical and sensory disabilities” until it was closed last year.

Despite a chronic shortage in affordable housing, OHG said attempts to rent out the single rooms drew a blank, leaving “disposal” as their only option.

A spokeswoman said: “Due to the internal layout that had been customised to fit the needs of the previous occupiers it was not possible to achieve the required rents. With the improved property market, the decision has been taken to try again to sell the property at auction.”

The spokeswoman denied the group was strapped for cash and maintained sell-offs to private developers was their last resort.

“OHG’s policy around the disposal of properties is to sell the minimum properties necessary,” she said.

One Housing Group – which counts former Islington Council leader Lib Dem Terry Stacy and the Lib Dem peer Dame Julia Neuberger on its board – acquired the care home after taking over the Patchwork Housing Association in 2005.

The Town Hall had funded rooms in Kiver Road for tenants with physical and sensory disabilities as part of its “Supporting People” scheme, helping people in care to live independently. But the council cut its contract with OHG in 2008 and the tenants were moved.

Now the group – one of the biggest in the capital – is selling the building, and another in Camden Town, at an auction at Bafta in Piccadilly on July 5.

The sale of social housing has been criticised as “a disgrace” by tenants leaders, who fear the policy – which has been bitterly opposed in neighbouring Camden – will heap more misery on families on the council housing waiting list.

Camden Council has, since Labour won back control of Town Hall in May, called an immediate halt to the unpopular Lib Dem policy of selling council homes.

Brian Potter, chairman of Islington Tenants Association, said: “Selling off any kind of social housing is disgraceful.

These homes will be snapped up by the private sector.

It will only make the waiting list longer.

It is disappointing, but not altogether surprising.

Because of the credit crunch, councils and housing associations are suffering at the moment.”

One Housing Group was formed four months before the economic crash in October 2008, which triggered a downturn in the property market.

It has recently won a massive contract for 284 affordable homes in the new King’s Cross development and has secured £80million from the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), a government quango commissioning low-rent housing schemes.

OHG paid for a £22m refurbishment of Arlington House homeless hostel in Camden Town, which was opened to great fanfare by London Mayor Boris Johnson and artist Tracey Emin last week.

In an internal bulletin, chief executive Mike Sweeney said: “All of this has been achieved despite the credit crunch, bank loan freeze and property collapse.”

The council is considering selling £15m of council-owned properties, though it is not known how many council homes could be lost to the private sector.