Tycoons’ homes lie empty in the shadow of Grenfell
1,800 vacant properties near site of horror blaze
‘It makes me very angry’
A ROW erupted last night over properties left empty near Grenfell Tower – many of them owned by billionaires.
While tycoons, foreign royalty and oligarchs are allowing buildings to lie unused, most of the former residents of the block remain in emergency accommodation seven weeks on from the devastating blaze.
Some 1,857 homes are sitting unoccupied in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where the fire took place.
A fraction of these could house the 255 survivors of the inferno, which claimed about 80 lives.
Owners of the empty homes include former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Ukrainian billionaire fighting extradition to the US, a former BBC executive, and a luxury property magnate.
Almost 700 properties are officially recorded as being empty for over two years, while around 50 have been unoccupied for between 11 and 15 years.
Ultra-rich foreigners often buy London homes as an investment because Britain’s property market is seen as a safe haven for their money, and then leave them empty as they increase in value.
Last night angry Grenfell survivors said they felt ignored by the Govern- ment. Pregnant Maryam Adam, 41, who lived next door to the flat where the fire started, said: ‘We still haven’t been rehoused and are still in a hotel.
‘So it makes me very angry to hear that there are lots of empty properties in the borough.’
Fellow survivor Amina Mohamed, 46, said: ‘They need to make this a priority. We need to rebuild our lives because at the moment we are in limbo.
‘We do not seem to be treated as well as others in the borough because we are not rich. It is not right that there are all these empty homes.’
The names of the high-profile owners of the empty properties were revealed when the council apparently accidentally sent out a list to a number of recipients.
Early reports suggested that 1,652 properties were unoccupied. But last night the council admitted that the true number was in fact 1,857.
Kensington and Chelsea has made 175 offers of accommodation to Grenfell survivors and 48 were accepted. Only 13 households have so far been rehoused.
Deputy leader of the council, Kim Taylor-Smith, said: ‘If a property has been left unoccupied and unfurnished for two years or more, property owners will be charged an additional 50 per cent of the full council tax charge.
‘Unfortunately, we have no powers to compel owners to live in their properties but we can and do offer support.’
Afew days after the Grenfell Tower fire, Jeremy Corbyn made the outrageous suggestion that the empty houses of rich people in Kensington and Chelsea should be ‘ requisitioned’ for residents made homeless by the disaster.
The Labour leader’s emotive proposal confirmed our worst fears. He doesn’t respect private property, and he believes that the State can help itself to whatever it wants in the cause of redistributing wealth.
That is exactly what his great hero, Hugo Chavez, did in Venezuela. In 2011, the socialist president ordered troops to take over farms, and urged the poor to occupy ‘unused’ land in prosperous parts of the capital, Caracas.
Squatters seized many properties. In fact, Chavez was targeting not just the very rich but the ordinary middle-class. The illegal seizure of land and houses helped kill off what little private investment remained in that country.
Now Venezuela is sinking into anarchy and civil war as Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, tears up the constitution and locks up his political opponents in a frenzied attempt to cling to power.
My message is that we should beware of Jeremy Corbyn, and his more sinister sidekick John McDonnell, when it comes to private property. In that unguarded moment, when he talked about requisitioning houses, he revealed his true beliefs.
Yet which of us is not shocked by this week’s disclosure that oligarchs, foreign royalty and billionaires own a large number of high-value properties in Kensington and Chelsea which lie vacant and unused?
According to the council’s figures, 1,652 properties in the borough are listed as unoccupied. Of these, 603 are recorded as having been empty for more than two years.
I’m not shocked because of what happened at Grenfell, whose recently refurbished flats in the same borough were seemingly much sought-after. That appalling inferno seems to have been the result of flawed building regulations and huge incompetence on the part of the council and its agencies. NO, THE needless tragedy of Grenfell is a separate issue. It seems to me highly undesirable that the super-rich, many of them foreign, should own enormous houses they don’t use in a city where there is such a shortage of property.
for it’s extremely likely that these revelations will stoke understandable resentment and envy among moderate people — feelings that will be cleverly exploited by zealots such as Corbyn and McDonnell. My worry is that the backlash provoked by such resentment will result in ordinary middleclass people, who may own a modest second home, being penalised because of the excesses of the super-rich.
Among the unoccupied premises in Kensington and Chelsea is a property bought for £53 million in May 2014 with an eye to redevelopment. The plans of the purchaser, a Ukrainian billionaire, are reportedly held up because he was detained in Vienna on a U.S. extradition warrant.
The owner of another unoccupied property is listed as billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. He bought a seven-bedroom Grade II-listed mansion for £16 million in 2015.
Other unoccupied properties are owned by offshore companies, including Dukes Lodge Ltd, part of Christian Candy’s luxury property business, which is listed as owning 26 homes in a mansion block valued at £85 million in 2015. It is claimed by the company that the flats are being renovated, and are at present uninhabitable.
It’s a fair assumption that the owners of many of these properties are so rich that they don’t need the rent, and are happy to leave them empty as they soar in value in London’s overheated housing market (which has admittedly been cooling in recent times).
what should be done? Needless to say, I’m not in favour of requisitioning them. An absentee owner of a mansion has precisely the same rights in law (assuming that the property was honestly acquired) as the owner- occupier of a small terraced house. Once we jettison the principle that all property owners possess equally inviolable rights, we are on the road to chaos.
But I am in favour of taxing the owners of unused houses a good deal more than they are taxed now. At the moment, local authorities in england are allowed to charge a premium of up to 50 per cent on council tax after properties have been empty and unfurnished for more than two years.
In the case of Kensington and Chelsea, the maximum extra charge under existing regulations would amount to slightly more than a £1,000 a year, which is so small a sum to the owners of these palaces as to be virtually unnoticeable. The Government should encourage councils to slap on a much heftier tax for prolonged non-occupation.
At the same time it should consider whether the existing council tax bands make sense. Can it be right that, in Kensington and Chelsea, the owner of a property worth £325,000 pays the same top rate of council tax as a billionaire living in a house worth £50 million?
Please believe me when I say that I’m not usually in favour of raising taxes on anyone — quite the opposite. But I can’t help noting that a government which is indulgent of absentee owners of gigantic mansions doesn’t mind punishing people much further down the food chain. THANKS
to former Chancellor George Osborne of blessed memory, people buying unpretentious second homes, and buy- to- l e t landlords, now have to pay an extra 3 per cent in stamp duty, which on a property costing £200,000 works out at £7,500.
This regrettable measure — combined with Mr Osborne’s hike in stamp duty on all properties worth more than £1 million — has in the view of most observers led to a marked decline in property sales, and a consequent slump in stamp duty revenues. Clever George!
It’s odd, isn’t it, that the authorities evidently think it all right to punish a British citizen who wants to buy a small second home in a run- down village in need of investment, but they won’t lay a hand on an oligarch who seldom rests his head in his vast mansion.
Of course, I don’t at all pretend that significantly higher council tax on a few hundred absentee homeowners is going to bring in much extra revenue for the Treasury. There are too few of them.
Nor do I suggest that such a tax would act for many of these people as a disincentive to maintaining empty houses. They are probably too rich to care. I don’t expect the great majority would change their ways. But at least the Government would have demonstrated that it recognises an abuse which gives a bad name to blameless owners of second homes.
Surely one lesson of the last election is that housing is a toxic issue. If the Tories are planning to be elected next time around, they had better build a lot more homes than the Coalition ever achieved.
But something more is needed which would cost very little. Corbyn and McDonnell and the rest of them will try to hoodwink decent people into believing that the Tories are simply the party of the very rich whereas they are, first and foremost, the party of those who want to get on in life — and own a house.
A little legitimate squeezing of the absent super-rich might not make much practical difference. But it would at least show that Theresa May’s Tory Party has the right moral priorities, and that its heart is in the right place.