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Scandal of council’s failure to check on standard of £400 a-week emergency accommodation

25 May 2007

An investigation by the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) has revealed that Oxford City Council has no budget to check on the services provided by private landlords who supply emergency accommodation to the council.

The council typically pays a whopping £30 per room per night for housing vulnerable homeless tenants, referred by Social Services—this amounts to over £400 per week for a typical 3 or 4 bedroom house converted into two bed-sits.

Despite these exorbitant rates the IWCA has received numerous complaints about substandard accommodation being used, with problems ranging from faulty wiring and plumbing to reported gas leaks.

With no routine checks in place there is no way for Oxford City Council to choose between landlords who provide decent housing and those who don’t. This effectively rewards those who spend less on maintaining their properties as they can use the savings to acquire more accommodation to rent out.

IWCA councillor Stuart Craft said, ‘This is yet another example of privatisation sanctioned by the New Labour government and supported by Labour and Lib Dem councillors. It is a race to the bottom that leads eventually to the taxpayer lining the pockets of slum landlords while the most vulnerable council tenants have to put up with appalling and potentially dangerous conditions.’

The system is ripe for exploitation. While there is no suggestion that any of the city council’s current private housing providers are doing anything illegal, the recent £611,000 emergency accommodation fraud orchestrated by Oxford landlord Mohammed Faruq illustrates what can go wrong without proper controls in place.

Even when everything is above-board, the current system leads to escalating costs to the taxpayer for social housing. Long-term council housing tenancies actually run at a substantial profit. Across the country more than £1.5 billion of tenants’ rent went to subsidise the treasury last year, while in Oxford the council will pay £13 million of its rental income this year back to the government.

On the other hand, an increasing amount of temporary housing provision is being purchased by councils from private providers at extortionate cost, due to dwindling stocks of local authority housing.

During ten years in office, New Labour has consistently refused to invest in council housing even though it is clearly the most cost-effective way of ending the present housing crisis.

Churchill Independent, issue 13