In 2022 councils faced a crisis: how to house increasing numbers of refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan? The Government’s Local Authority Housing Fund offered £1.2 billion in three rounds: the first in 2023 provided £500 million, of which the Mayor of London got £126 million to distribute to boroughs under the Mayor’s Refugee Housing Programme. Unlike other boroughs, Camden (LBC) has refused to detail what it got or where it was spent.
LBC had an expensive embarrassment on its hands. Starting in 2019, it had redeveloped Highgate Newtown Community Centre (HNCC), originally meaning to deliver a handful of social-housing flats, the rest being leasehold – the sale of which was to bankroll the building of all 21 flats and a replacement HNCC.
Not all Highgate people are as comfortable as those up on the hill. HNCC’s cul-de-sac courtyard – a WW2 barracks and tank repair depot – ran successfully for over four decades as a community-led and administered amenity, catering to needy locals and others. There was a busy nursery (which we hired for our child’s birthday party), wood workshop, a large and airy sports hall, a subsidised laundrette, meals and Christmas parties for older locals. Tremendous community benefit and input for minimal cash outlay; perhaps a bit scruffy, but much loved through two generations
The volunteer-led café grew vegetables in its kitchen garden; activities included pottery, yoga and art classes; local councillors held surgeries. The Fresh Youth Academy, a drop-in youth centre with its own former mission hall and the use of the big sports hall, had been refurbished for close to £1 million and kept many local youngsters out of mischief. LBC’s main input was to charge the volunteer management committee only a modest rent, on a yearly-renewed licence.
By 2013 LBC was determined to ‘sweat its assets’, selling council-owned property and land to developers in return for some flats: but this CIP (‘Community Investment Programme’) has resulted in a far less than expected net increase in LBC’s social housing stock and a corresponding slump in the book value of the council’s assets. CIP’s beady eye fell on the HNCC, which could have been refurbished to suit the 21st century for around £4 million, with a vacancy of around two years – there were offers. But absent a 21-year lease, no charity could fund it.
LBC, determined to be its own developer for once, muscled in on the centre’s activities and shut down everything by the end of 2018. Demolition followed the next year. The council manipulated the zoning system, getting its chief planning officer to certify the site as dense inner-urban (think High Holborn) instead of the leafy outer-suburb South Highgate actually is, in order to give itself planning permission to cram the site. The builder’s graphic above shows how the new scheme looms over the classic terraces of modest, cobbled Bertram Street. Myopic and gushing articles in, for example, the Guardian belittle the brutal impact of this bullying over-development on its neighbours on three sides.
As the project bungled on, the social housing was cancelled and the final plan was to sell 41 flats, many of them tiny: in one design some had just one window. Development costs soared to what locals think may be £30 million (again, LBC has refused to say) and Savills International, which sells this type of London bolthole to overseas investors, advised LBC the flats would fetch nowhere near the possible £730,000 each that they had cost (£30 million divided by 41).
A thumping loss to the north London borough? No – the taxpayer, in the shape of the Mayor’s Refugee Housing Programme (MHRP), came to the rescue. So how was LBC’s grant from the Mayor spent? The application form says on p4 that the MRHP offered “capital grants” and the Mayor’s £126 million aimed to buy “up to 630 affordable homes for those with acute housing needs who have arrived in the UK via recent Ukrainian and Afghan resettlement schemes”. That implied £200,000 per property (perhaps more, if fewer than 630 were acquired).
The 41 cramped flats at HNCC were never designed to house families with children. Some are so small the balconies had to be given higher walls and be counted as “habitable space” to meet minimum standards; none has a garden. Ten were knocked into five and in 2023 LBC boasted of “acquiring” (from itself!) the eventual 36 flats to house solely Afghans, despite local controversy. Ukrainians need not apply, and now the MoD’s massive data leak has been revealed, it seems we know why.
The following is guesswork: if LBC was able to use MRHP capital to spend say an additional £2 million on the alterations, that may be a total of £32 million, and an average cost per flat of nearly £890,000! Twice their open-market value, at least. But the council’s problem magically went away.
Controversy continues. The café at the renamed HNCP (for Partners) opened in May, run by Terroni of Clerkenwell. It gets so little business that it’s only open from Monday to Friday, and locals don’t suppose it’ll survive. The bottles of booze in this photo may not be of much interest to the new residents. The HNCP centre also formally opened in May, but unlike the previous drop-in ethos, people wanting to use it must now provide a name and address and there are swipe cards. LBC wanted to charge so much rent and rates that HNCP has had to relinquish the second floor, which will now house council officials and their services, and the youth centre on the third floor still hasn’t reopened.
Original promises by councillors that square-footage of the new public facilities would be equivalent to the old HNCC were jettisoned years ago. There’s more to the HNCC debacle than mentioned here, and more to learn – someone will get those Mayor’s Refugee Housing Programme figures out of LBC eventually. In May, local children witnessed a stabbing outside the centre, and the council has succeeding in creating, at enormous cost to the taxpayer, what many locals openly call a ghetto. Another triumph for Camden Labour, a.k.a. the Democratic People’s Republic of Kamden.
Last week’s revelations about just who has been arriving from Afghanistan, and with how many ‘close family members’, have done nothing to improve local social cohesion. One happy thought, though: here, the Afghan girls will be getting an education.
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The fact that the author has chosen to remain anonymous speaks volumes for how effective the state’s campaign to silence criticism has been.
It’s not just the state, it is also all those who agree with it’s rhetoric/ propaganda/ ideology type slurry.
Wrong post!
One happy thought, though: here, the Afghan girls will be getting an education.
How can this be in our multicultural paradise? Surely, if our deranged rulers really believed in multiculturalism, they would respect, nay, promote, the right of parents from the wonderful countries our rulers are in love with NOT to educate their girls.
Good point. I never understood why the education of girls in Afghanistan, or indeed any foreign country, was somehow OUR PROBLEM.
It’s the clown-world attitude of our rulers: they’re keen to change other people’s cultures to more resemble ours, while telling us how inferior our culture is to those other cultures!!!
Therein lies the rub with multiculturalism. Those on the left who claim that we already have it, embrace it and are proud of it, miss the point that it is only the aspects of foreign cultures that most align with western democratic values that get to be part of this selective “multi-culture”. Values such as the right to education conflict with the cultural outlawing of female education we still see today in many Arab nations. And how about being considered unequal under the law – are we going to embrace that culture too?
If you can call it anything, it is “edited multiculturalism”.
Local councils seem to be able to reallocate funds from one budget to another at will and with no accountability, just as HMT has done. Is it not time Parliament intervened.
Perhaps proper budgetary control should be a Reform UK menifesto policy.
What is this mystery housing of which he speaks? Could it be housing with people already living there, such as is being reported by private tenants being told they have to leave by their landlord so they can rake it in by taking on migrants?
”At today’s Liaison Committee @Keir_Starmer
was asked where he was going to put illegals once they’re moved from hotels.
The Prime Minister told the Committee there was “lots of housing” that could be used.
Tell that to the record number of under 35’s living with their parents.”
https://x.com/WorldByWolf/status/1947306250011570362
I thought Ranting had already declared the country to be short of 1.5 million new homes and she was going to sort it? Now Kneel says there is “lots of housing.” One of them is telling porkies…
Oh, ok, one of them is lying.
Any intervention by Parliament will simply result in more skimming off the top.
Local Councils basically do what they want and are absolute cesspits of corruption which is why our Turd Worlders are keen to get rid of Labour and do things for themselves.
Here in Oldham we have received an announcement via one of the local rags (largely funded via council advertising which keeps them on board) that a career criminal and one time getaway driver for Dale Cregan and who is also allegedly married to the leader of the Council is going to stand in the elections next May and he’s not called Smith; neither should his adopted moniker ‘Irish’ suggest he has any affinity to that blessed isle. Marvellous innit? And the likelihood is that he will be given a Turd World ward where he can be safe in the knowledge that the block postal vote will see him safely elected.
The story of Camden is symptomatic of how low this country has fallen. The only positive is that the veneer of respectability and decency has now gone. Whilst many are wakening to these facts it is doubtful enough are ready yet to get off their arses to do something.
“… many of them tiny: in one design some had just one window.”
Ideal for the Afghan incomers – just put bars on the door and window of each.
Nice one.
WTH is this tripe? ‘The Combatting Hate Against Muslims Fund’?? Well when you are society’s perma-victims you require infinity appeasement, apparently;
The British Muslim Trust (BMT) has been selected as the recipient of the government’s new Combatting Hate Against Muslims Fund, a key initiative to address the rise in anti-Muslim hatred across England.
The fund was established this year to respond to the evolving nature of religious intolerance and targeted hate incidents faced by Muslim communities, which are at the highest level on record.
BMT will use the funding to develop a robust reporting system that captures both online and offline incidents of anti-Muslim hatred, including those that may go unreported to the police.
It will also enable the organisation to provide direct support to victims, raise awareness of what constitutes a hate crime, and encourage greater reporting from affected communities.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/british-muslim-trust-appointed-as-new-partner-to-monitor-and-tackle-anti-muslim-hatred
a key initiative to address the rise in anti-Muslim hatred across England.
This is very interesting. So presumably some Muslims feel that this “rise in hate” has nothing whatsoever to do with the behaviour and words of some Muslims. Either this attitude is the result of an astonishing lack of self-awareness, or it’s the result of an attempt to deceive us – an attempt which this contemptible government supports.
The potential for this to turn nasty, very nasty is deeply worrying. Are we going to see the establishment of a muzzie Internet police?
Amazing how people fail to embrace being blown up, stabbed and their daughters being gang raped. So narrow minded.
Civil war must come. It’s the only way to save our people from genocide by government.
I fecking hate them.
What an illustration of the corruption and ineptitude in local government. Easy to be generous with taxpayers’ money, until the taxpayers rebel.
This sort of thing makes me feel so angry that I sometimes think I should stop reading for my own sanity.
I agree. There is so much material out there that I have to ration it or I would go bananas.