The ‘beds in sheds’ that shame Britain
. . . and make fortunes for slum landlords ‘housing’ countless desperate migrants in squalid outbuildings
UNSHAVEN and bleary-eyed, Constantin Radulescu talks me through his nightly commute home from the north London industrial estate where he spends 50 hours a week on a hamburger production line.
after leaving the factory in the early hours of the morning, he has two 20-minute bus rides before being deposited on a pavement not far from Mill hill golf club.
Then he walks for ten minutes through an upscale neighbourhood, whose residents include sports Direct tycoon Mike ashley and arsenal manager arsene Wenger, before arriving at a large mock Tudor property with pillars outside its front door and luxury cars on the driveway.
This is the place where Constantin lives — or rather its front entrance.
But like most residents of this outwardly glamorous suburban residence, he’s hardly living in the lap of luxury.
Instead, the 20-something eastern european migrant comes and goes via a back entrance, to part of the property that has been masked from the road by a tall green fence.
here, on a plot of land roughly the size of two tennis courts, is a rabbit warren of sheds and outhouses, centred on a litter-strewn courtyard, where Constantin and dozens of his countrymen inhabit tiny shared bedrooms, furnished with filthy mattresses.
For living cheek-by-jowl with this highly prosperous neighbourhood of one of the world’s wealthiest cities is a hidden community whose squalid conditions resemble a Third World shanty town.
‘I pay £200 per month to share a room in a small cabin,’ Constantin explains. ‘We try to keep it clean, but it is not easy. It is very small and it is damp. There is heating, but the blankets are thin and the bathroom is covered in mould.’
The Romanian, who is using a pseudonym to protect his identity, is among scores of migrant workers who inhabit the ramshackle site.
They pay monthly rent to the owner of the mock-Tudor mansion, Gerry Fitzgerald.
AN IRISH builder who built the shanty town without planning permission around five years ago, Fitzgerald was dragged reluctantly into the limelight this week after aerial images of his backyard slum dwellings were splashed across the news pages.
Dubbed the ‘scumdog millionaire’, it emerged that he’d been ordered to tear down the ‘ sub- standard’ and illegal accommodation, which consists of roughly six large huts and cabins, and is believed to be earning him as much as £40,000 a month in rent.
‘The owners are making money from our misery,’ adds Constantin, who comes from a small village outside Bucharest. ‘ They exploit us because they know we do not know the country and many of us do not know the language. and if anyone makes a complaint they are told to leave immediately.’
some of the illegal properties were demolished this week, but aerial photos of the site reveal that several remained standing yesterday, with up to 40 people still living there last night, including ten children. as many as three times that number are thought to have lived there in the past.
Though thick-necked men prevented me from gaining access to the site this week, Constantin agreed to conduct a virtual tour, using the video camera on his smartphone. The encampment is a claustrophobic maze of corridors and tiny living areas, with residents sleeping on rickety beds in airless shared rooms.
The kitchens were full of dirty crockery and overflowing ashtrays, a bathroom had cracked walls and mouldy tiling, and exposed light-bulbs were dangling from the ceilings.
‘everyone who is living in the camp is from eastern europe, mainly from Romania,’ he explained, before launching into an account of how he ended up living in such squalor.
‘I have had to leave to find work. I would prefer to be at home, but there are no jobs.’
Before coming to Britain, he worked in agriculture in Italy for three years. ‘But the work finished. My cousin is in London, and he told me there were jobs here,’ he explained. ‘so I came to London.
‘My cousin is living in the camp so he got me a place there, too. I have been here a year. It isn’t very nice, but I earn just £7 an hour, so what else can I afford?’
Constantin’s encampment is the latest high-profile example of a problem afflicting even the most affluent areas of London and the south- east — a phenomenon known as ‘beds in sheds’. an ugly by-product of Britain’s critical housing crisis, it has seen an explosion in the number of unscrupulous landlords converting outhouses, garden sheds, lean-tos and, in the worst cases, entire back gardens into slum housing for cash-strapped migrant workers.
Dig into the available data, or glance through listings at magistrates’ courts, where councils are currently prosecuting vast numbers of rogue landlords, and the sheer scale of the problem seems to beggar belief.
In 2011, when ‘beds in sheds’ first came to public attention, southall Council in West London revealed that it was investigating more than 1,000 outhouses per year, and officials estimated that there could be as many as 10,000 illegal dwellings across the city.
But, since then, the problem has grown and grown.
Last year, one of London’s 32 borough councils, harrow, hired a firm to use thermal imaging cameras attached to drones to search for illegal shanty dwellings. They uncovered no fewer than 319 illegal developments — four times more than suspected — in a single operation.
THE worst, housing entire families, were infested with cockroaches and rats, riddled with damp and exposed wiring, and had no running water, or sanitation.
some modest terrace properties were found to contain as many as 30 residents.
Getting rich from the misery of residents is a generation of slum landlords, most of whom, like Gerry Fitzgerald, live outwardly respectable lives.
‘The people who are running these properties are what you might call the crack cocaine dealers of the housing market,’ says Clark Barratt of the national Renters alliance, a firm which claims compensation for victims of landlord abuse, and is pursuing some 300 cases.
‘They prey on vulnerable people who have an extreme need and don’t want, or aren’t able, to complain. Many of the residents cannot speak english, or are not here legally, so they are unwilling or unable to go to the authorities.’
Only last month, police were staggered to discover 35 eastern european men crammed into a single semi-detached property in edgware, north-West London, where filthy mattresses were covering the floor of every room apart from the kitchen. some were sleeping on damp mattresses propped up on plastic garden furniture underneath a cheap gazebo on the patio.
This modern- day slum turned out to be owned by brothers neil
and Sunil Hathi and their mother, meenaxi, who all work as doctors, own a £ 1.5 million detached property nearby with two mercedes cars parked outside, and have posted images on their social media accounts of their exotic beach and ski holidays.
Asked to explain himself, Sudhir Hathi, meenaxi’s estranged husband, who lives in a £900,000 detached house 400 yards from the site, claimed the home was sub-let without the family’s knowledge, claiming: ‘i am a victim here.’
but brent Council thought otherwise, condemning it as a ‘shocking’ and ‘shameful’ example of ‘rogue landlords who make their money by exploiting people’. brent, with its high immigrant population, is one of the london boroughs worst affected by the ‘ beds in sheds’ epidemic.
The council has successfully prosecuted 110 rogue landlords since the start of 2016.
They include Harsha and Chandni Shah, a mother and daughter who were prosecuted for housing 31 migrants in a small four-bedroom house in napier road, which is ten minutes’ walk from Wembley Central station.
enforcement officers who conducted a dawn raid on the property last summer were shocked by the squalor, with one woman discovered living in a leanto shack constructed from wood off- cuts, pallets and tarpaulin in the garden.
Video footage showed it had no heating or electricity and was infested with mice and rats.
each of these vulnerable occupants was paying £65 in cash per week, meaning that the single property was generating around £110,000 a year in rent.
Finding the Shah family guilty of multiple breaches of housing regulations, magistrates said the case had ‘revealed how people desperate for accommodation in london can be exploited’. They will be sentenced in the new Year.
i visited napier road this week, to find it apparently empty, with the shack demolished. but you don’t have to spend much time in the surrounding streets to realise that in this corner of the capital, it’s very far from a one-off.
on nearby ealing road is a two- storey flat where a rogue landlord called Shyam Popat was last month fined £ 10,000 after being found guilty of illegally cramming 24 adults and children into filthy bedrooms that were infested with cockroaches.
Just around the corner in london road is a filthy terrace house owned by a property solicitor called Suhasini Gurusinghe who was fined £10,000 during the summer for running an illegal bedsit complete with a ‘kitchen in the garden shed’ which inspectors found to be in danger of collapse.
Across Wembley, windows of newsagents are crammed with notices offering ‘rooms’ in shared accommodation. most will be legal. but at the cheaper end of the market, the tell-tale signs of ‘beds in sheds’ are there. Some adverts talk in a sort of code, of ‘ box rooms’ or ‘studio’ accommodation, and list how close the properties are to 24-hour bus routes.
others state simply that there is a ‘garage to rent’ or list rooms for as little as £200 a month — a third of the going rate advertised in reputable estate agents.
many are targeted at recently arrived immigrants, saying the properties require tenants to conform to certain religious customs such as vegetarianism or not drinking alcohol. Some are gender segregated.
Dharmik, an estate agent who works close to the area’s Tube station, tells me there is essentially a two- tier housing market operating here.
one, which his firm services, seeks to offer properly licensed accommodation, typically to students or young professionals. The other caters to illegal migrants, or those on the breadline, who are forced to look to the black market.
‘The sad thing is that if you are a landlord, you’re barely making
money if you play by the rules, whereas the dodgy guys are getting rich,’ he tells me.
he explains that a typical semidetached house in Wembley costs around £650,000. rented via an agency, it might generate £2,000 a month, or £24,000 a year — a return of just 3.6 per cent before any costs, agency fees or tax are taken into consideration.
take the same property, knock up a shed in the garden, and fill it and the main house with 30 residents paying £70 a week, and you’ll generate around £110,000 a year. Often, it’s paid in cash, meaning large quantities can be kept away from the tax man.
For years, landlords have exploited loopholes in the law to enrich themselves in this manner. it’s perfectly legal, for example, to convert a garden shed into a ‘granny flat,’ provided you get planning permission.
it’s also within the law to convert attics and living areas to create large numbers of rooms within an existing property.
laws get broken only when such homes are rented out without the landlord securing a licence to let it as a house in Multiple Occupation (HMO). Yet proving this can be hard. Without the permission of residents, who are often scared to speak to the authorities, councils can gain access to properties only if they have a warrant.
One such raid was conducted on the site of a former hotel in Wembley, where nihal Seneviratne was found to have built 26 tiny, substandard flats, housing more than 100 tenants.
While the minimum legal size of a london studio is 26 square metres, some of his were as small as 9 square metres, roughly the size of an average estate car.
last month Seneviratne was fined more than £338,000.
in a similar case in nearby colindale, wealthy businessman amir Golesorkhi was found to have turned his garage into two small, substandard flats and rented them to tenants for seven years.
he was fined £ 12,000 and ordered to pay £116,141 in confiscation proceedings.
THE Department for communities and local Government, which is in charge of housing, says such cases show its determination to ‘crack down’ on rogue landlords. last year the department introduced new rules on HMO licensing in its housing act, making it easier for councils to prosecute them.
But sometimes, government also seems to be part of the problem.
Back in Mill hill, constantin tells me that Gerry Fitzgerald’s current tenants include several families, and ‘ around ten’ small children.
Many have, over the years, successfully claimed housing benefit, he says. and official records suggest payments were recorded to residents of the site in both 2012 and 2015.
and so it is that the so-called ‘Scumdog millionaire’ behind Britain’s latest illegal backyard shanty town has been paid for by me and you.