Lambeth gives the green light to squatters (Lambeth Liberal Democrats)

Lambeth Liberal Democrats <office@lambethlibdems.org.uk>

Lambeth gives the green light to squatters

March 24, 2009 12:23 PM

Boarded up empty council house in Streatham

One of the thousand boarded up and empty council homes in Lambeth

Dozy Labour-run Lambeth with at least 17,000 homeless families on its housing waiting list and where the average waiting time to be rehoused is currently more than six years has released details of 1000 Council-owned empty properties to an organisation which promotes squatting.

With Lambeth's crisis-riven Housing department in meltdown following revelations of the loss of £22 million, Liberal Democrat councillors, and many others we suspect, are furious to discover that details of empty properties in the borough have been handed over by the council to squatters through the Advisory Service for Squatters.

Liberal Democrats have criticized the growth in the number of empty council-owned properties which has doubled since Labour regained control of the Council in 2006. In 2002 the incoming Lib Dem-led administration discovered that Lambeth did not even know which properties it owned.

Among infamous cases of squatting uncovered was the Million Pound house in Stockwell, which became the property of the squatter because the Council failed to take action. In another recent case Labour-run Lambeth allowed a whole block of flats, Limerick Court, in leafy Clapham Park to become squatted while the organised squatting of the Minet Library House on the Brixton/Camberwell borders, which has been turned into a centre for squatter activists, has been yet another recent high profile case. And earlier Labour-Lambeth squatting bungles in St Agnes Place, Kennington and Rushcroft Road opposite the Town Hall led to decades of inconclusive legal action.

The estimated 1000 empty properties in the borough are costing council tenants and taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost rent, council tax and security costs while creating a blight on the local area. Labour Lambeth has wasted so much money that it does not have the funds to do the properties up - many are in such a bad state that there is no realistic prospect of returning them to use. A number have been deliberately wrecked by the Council in an attempt to prevent resquatting - in one notorious case in north Brixton a house in a conservation area had its staircase removed.

When properties get into such a bad state as this it makes sense, say the Liberal Democrats, to dispose of them and reinvest the funds in social housing but out of political dogma Labour is insisting on holding on to the worst properties. At the same time it is offloading at rock-bottom auction prices scores of empty flats which require minimal work to bring them back into use.

Lib Dem Leader Cllr Ashley Lumsden said, "This is a housing tragedy that is rapidly turning to farce. Labour seems hell-bent on destroying public housing in Lambeth through a mixture of brain-numbing incompetence and sheer bloody-mindedness."