£2.2m council house
Somali refugees with 7 children pay just £90 a week rent... and have lived in this Georgian home for 15 years
A ReFUGee family is paying just £90 a week to live in a Georgian property worth £2.2million.
The four-bedroom, four storey house in Islington, north London, is thought to be one of the most expensive council homes in the country.
If rented privately, the house in Clerkenwell – within walking distance of London’s West end – could fetch more than £5,000 a month.
But cleaner Muriidi Abati, 57, who earns £7 an hour, and his wife Maryan Mohamed, 44, pay as little as £90 a week to Islington Council.
The Somali refugees have lived in the house with their seven children, aged eight to 23, for 15 years. ‘We’re very lucky and grateful to have this house. It’s sad there are not enough houses for everyone,’ Mrs Mohamed told The Sun.
It is believed that Islington council has around 18,000 families on its waiting list but last year found homes for only 1,250.
Average property prices in the trendy London borough stood at £774,923 last year, according to property website RightMove, with terraced properties going for an average of £1,364,828. Refugees can qualify as a priority for housing if a local council deems them to be ‘vulnerable’ under the Housing Act 1996.
Although refugee status is not listed as a specific vulnerability, officials can include this under the ‘special reason’ category.
For – several including years Islington London – councils have been offering homeless families accommodation hundreds of miles out of the capital, where rents are cheaper and there is more availability.
But there is no obligation on tenants to take up such offers.
A neighbour of the Abati family said he was also a council tenant as were many of his neighbours.
The man, who did not want to be named, said his home was worth up to £3million. A similar double fronted property on the street recently sold for £2.18million. The sought-after area is home to an array of Michelin-star restaurants, theatres and trendy bars. Islington is not the only area in the UK to offer luxury properties as council houses. In September a former seafront council house in St Ives, Cornwall, fetched £1.44million at auction. And in 2013 a Grade II property near London’s Borough Market that had previously been a council house went for £2.96million. Thousands of council tenants have become property millionaires after buying their council homes under Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ scheme. Since the 1980s, around 1.5million council homes have been sold to tenants through the scheme with discounts of up to 70 per cent.
Soaring housing prices over the last few decades mean many have since been able to benefit.
In Hackney, east London, one ex- council house that was purchased by the tenant for £ 171,000 in 2000 sold for £1million in 2014. Last night Islington Council refused to comment.