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Heygate Estate redevelopment: just 79 social rented units out of a total 2,535 new homes

Where's the other replies gone?
ETA, they've reappeared :)
The council 'officers' involved should be, at least looking at charges of 'misconduct while in public office'
How come panorama etc aren't piling into this?
And the mayors office?
 
I read that Dave Hill article as well, was going to post the link here. He was far too soft on the Council and Peter John (Southwark leader) I thought.

I'd like to know more about that 'more council housing' thing too, -- I'm very sceptical, especially given that they seem to plan to meet a chunky proportion of the cost from more sales of the Council's own property (nothing stated about what proportion of that would be from actual housing, but still).

But there's a mention of making the new council properties legally sale-proof -- if true, that sounds to me like they're borrowing from Enfield's current ideas.
 
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There HAS to be criminal charges brought to bear over this:

A local council has spent more on emptying an estate than it made by selling it.

In early 2013 Southwark Council accidentally disclosed the ‘Heygate Regeneration Agreement’, signed with Australian developer Lend Lease. The Agreement shows that the Heygate Estate was sold for a mere £50m, after Southwark spent £65.4m on evictions of tenants. Worse still, the estimate for the estates refurbishment was almost half of this: £35m. The scandal (or “Heygate-gate”) is a paradigm of the fate of council housing in London. 3,000 tenants and leaseholders were evicted from a structurally sound and well-loved estate, to be replaced with 2,500 luxury flats with only 73 units for social rent. Displaced tenants were promised new homes that will now never materialise.

Lend Lease is making a tidy sum from this development and nearby One the Elephant, a 37 story tower building in Southwark with zero affordable housing.

The Standard Evening has also learnt that Lend Lease wined and dined the Leader of the council Peter John with tickets for the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, as well as first class tickets for him and Southwark’s Chief Exec Eleanor Kelly to the MIPIM property fair in Cannes last year. MIPIM remains the favoured honeymoon destination for developers and politicians globally. It has been engulfed by protests and criticism this week.

http://www.standardevening.co.uk/st...es-money-in-sale-of-well-loved-housing-estate
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Favelado said:
Whenever I feel miserable I like to come to this thread just to wallow in it all a bit more. It's so brazen and they've got away with it. Have Private Eye kept plugging away at it? Someone somewhere can go to prison if anyone digs around enough, it's utter filth and someone's filled their boots.
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its only something and I'm not a supporter, but didn't Class War have some sort of protest about housing yesterday that was well attended, I used to come on here to find out about such things but there is nothing about it.
 
treelover said:
its only something and I'm not a supporter, but didn't Class War have some sort of protest about housing yesterday that was well attended, I used to come on here to find out about such things but there is nothing about it.
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oh dear! aren't posters providing you with enough information for you to post elsewhere? :(

it's called the poor doors protest and there is stuff on here
 
Perhaps not directly related to the topic of this thread, but nevertheless relevant (and shocking) I think

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...t-and-destroying-his-possessions-9796994.html

Judge blasts Southwark Council for evicting Sudanese tenant and destroying all of his possessions

High Court judge rules that housing officers entered a conspiracy to 'harm' refugee


By CAHAL MILMO
Thursday 16 October 2014


Housing officers conspired to unlawfully evict a Sudanese refugee from his council flat and destroy his possessions, including memory sticks holding thousands of hours of work, before then covering up their wrongdoing, a judge has ruled.

The victim, who was granted British citizenship after fleeing Sudan’s civil war in 1985, was made homeless for a year and forced to sleep on the streets after officials acting for Southwark Borough Council entered his home while he attended a court hearing in April last year over rent arrears of £18 per week.

All his possessions, including his passport, credit cards, furniture and computer equipment containing several years of research and personal material, were removed on the day of the eviction and destroyed in a waste disposal facility.
In a swingeing ruling, a High Court judge found that housing officers entered into a conspiracy to “harm” the man, known only as AA, by securing his eviction from his flat in Peckham, south London, and then conceal their actions from investigators.
Judge Anthony Thornton QC said: “The various officers conspired to evict AA by unlawful means, to seize and destroy his possessions by unlawful means and to cause him harm and loss by evicting him and dispossessing him of his possessions.”
In his own complaint, AA, who had sought £2.4m in damages, said he felt he had been “robbed of my dignity and pride” by the local authority.

Southwark, which is London’s largest social landlord with 40,000 properties, and which bills itself as providing a “great place” for its tenants to live, admitted that it had “got things very wrong” when dealing with AA.
But the local authority refused to say whether three officials singled out for particular criticism - income officer Christiana Okwara, her line manager Brian Davis, and resident officer Johanna Ashley - were still employed.

The decision to evict AA, who had been a council tenant for 23 years, and previously ran a charity helping children in Sudan, was the culmination of a lengthy process during which he had fallen into arrears on his rent due to an £18 shortfall between his housing benefit and the sum due to the local authority.

By the time of his eviction, which the council said followed multiple attempts to reach an arrangement to make up the deficit, AA owed £2,353 in unpaid rent.

The High Court ruled that by early 2013, Mr Davis and Ms Okwara had become determined to have AA removed from his flat and had a motive which was “eviction at all costs”.

Procedures for securing evictions, including obtaining permission from a judge to start proceedings, were not followed and a requirement that all flat clearances take place in the presence of two council officers was ignored, the judgment said.

Added to the fact that Ms Ashley knew AA’s possessions, which were of “incalculable and personal value” to him, were at risk of being destroyed, it was clear that the actions of the three officers made them liable for “misfeasance in public office” or the misuse or abuse of power, the court found.

Judge Thornton said: “They each acted with the intention of harming AA by evicting him when there were no reasonable grounds for evicting him and by arranging for his possessions to be seized and destroyed unlawfully.”

Southwark Borough Council, which had originally offered AA £6,400 in compensation for the destruction of his belongings, said it had reached an out-of-court settlement with the man.

Councillor Richard Livingstone, a cabinet member for housing, said: “We realise we got things very wrong when dealing with this person and their possessions. We have apologised for any distress we may have caused. We acted swiftly and took strong disciplinary action against our staff when this came to our attention.”

The council said it could not discuss the details of disciplinary action against individual staff.
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This needs a Pickles-led Tower Hamlets-style investigation - oh hold on, same corruption, wrong party, wrong ethnic group. Go figure.
 
Concrete Heart Land
‘A cinematic drift through the destruction of the Heygate Estate’

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Steven Ball and Laura Oldfield-Ford will present their individual responses to the Social cleansing of the Heygate Estate through the screening of Steven Ball and Rastko Novaković film ‘Concrete Heart Land’ and the presentation of drawings and a live reading of texts produced by Laura Oldfield-Ford.

6pm on Tuesday 27 January 2015

Film and Drama studio
Arts 2 Building, (first floor)
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London
E1 4NS

Laura Oldfield Ford is a London-based artist and writer concerned with issues surrounding contemporary political protest, urbanism, architecture and memory. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2007 she has become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism. She is the author of Savage Messiah.
http://lauraoldfieldford.blogspot.co.uk/

Concrete Heart Land,a film by Steven Ball and Rastko Novaković, exposes the social cleansing of the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South London. It marks the moment that the estate was finally lost as social housing to make way for an unjust 'regeneration' scheme.
http://concreteheartland.info/
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The saga of the Heygate viability document release drags on. Despite Southwark being ordered to release it (bar a few sections mainly relating to commercial rent levels) in May 2014, they haven't. After much heel-dragging, they were ordered back to the Information Tribunal this week. It was a closed session so no news as yet.

A history of this sorry tale : http://35percent.org/heygate-foi-eir-tribunal/
 
editor said:
I'm hoping criminal charges will be brought to bear over this outrage.
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At the very least, this should set a legal precedent for public versus commercial interests in the murky world of Sect.106 obligations.

The whole thing was started under a LibDem council and continued under the current Labour council. The ex LD Council Leader and Deputy Leader set up their own Property PR/Consultancies after losing. The Dep's company now 'advising' the owners of Elephant Shopping Centre. Lords knows where you'd point a charge... it's all so cosy.

Check out the Ex Dep. Leader's shiny new enterprise. Be warned, the website is nauseating from the off; "Once in a while something unique is born..."

http://carvil-ventures.co.uk/
 
William of Walworth said:
I was a tenant of Southwark for 17 years. I used to think they were a better landlord than Lambeth .... :hmm: :( :mad:
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Part of the problem is that so-called "austerity" budgeting has pretty much licenced local authorities to sell off the family silver in order to fund services, and that has left the door open for a lot of local pols and council officers to feather their nests, if they're so inclined (and some of them are). I'm not talking about bribery, by the way, but about little quid pro quo arrangements that often amount to "a favour" somewhere down the line.
 
ViolentPanda said:
Part of the problem is that so-called "austerity" budgeting has pretty much licenced local authorities to sell off the family silver in order to fund services, and that has left the door open for a lot of local pols and council officers to feather their nests, if they're so inclined (and some of them are). I'm not talking about bribery, by the way, but about little quid pro quo arrangements that often amount to "a favour" somewhere down the line.
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Thing is, a little quid pro quo starts off as favours and ends up as bribery and corruption.
 
equationgirl said:
Thing is, a little quid pro quo starts off as favours and ends up as bribery and corruption.
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Yeah.
What I meant is that it's not blatant bribery of the "here's ten grand and a nice new BMW 5 series" kind, it's more insidious and less easy to spot than that - patronage and similar shit that may take years to pay off,but eventually does for the corrupt person and their corruptor.
 
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