Snitching to an empty home hotline won’t help the housing crisis
It’s time to report your neighbour, says Westminster Council, which oversees some of the wealthiest areas in London including Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Mayfair. Not for noise, bad behaviour or planning infringement. For being antisocial — in the sense of not being part of society.
The council is planning to set up an empty homes hotline. Any property left empty for more than six months is worthy of being reported. The implied target is not your average Joe but the high net worth foreign buyers who’ve bought big properties in these areas and mothballed them. They are so-called “buy-to-leave” purchasers or, as council leader Adam Hug terms it, “absentee international investment”.
An Englishman’s home is his castle, but international owners are subject to different standards? Strange.
The council has collated data showing 1,150 self-declared long-term empty homes — those left unoccupied for at least two years — a 123 per cent increase between 2021 and 2022. That’s a useful date range for their argument: some of us may remember the Covid era, when the jet set may have had better options than a locked-down city.
The hotline is supposedly to discover many more and ease the housing crisis. Hug, who leads a council that turned Labour for the first time in its history last year, tugs at the heartstrings when he explains why they are taking action: “For many, the thought of so many homes sitting empty, essentially left to rot, while thousands wait for housing, is hard to swallow.”
Are central boroughs hollowed out by absentees, as Hug also suggests? Anyone who has tried to get a reservation at a good central London restaurant or stepped into Harrods can report there is no shortage of custom around. Some Knightsbridge quarters may feel a little quiet during the day, but no more so than many a dormitory suburb, where the workers have all Tubed into central London for work, leaving the odd pensioner or parent and child to stroll along the back streets.
The council mission is to “encourage” those homeowners to rent out their properties — which seems an unlikely outcome and hardly a fix. There remain fundamental questions about access to the British property market but the idea that the high-end properties in the diplomatic district of Belgravia is going to be transformed into social housing is for the birds.
This is about extracting more money. There is no mention in the council statement of the fact that, armed with the hotline information, the council can apply extra charges. Properties that are left empty for more than two years pay double council tax. After five years the tax triples and after 10 years, it quadruples.
If the owners choose not to rent them out, what then is the final threat? Would the council attempt to repossess Mayfair and Knightsbridge town houses and sell them cheap to the masses? I don’t think so. That’s not how property works here.
The owners will be paying council tax. Unless the properties are undergoing renovations, and therefore not being “left to rot”, other exemptions are unlikely to apply. By signing over regular money to local taxes, the owners are already subsidising everyone else’s schools, roads, rubbish collections and local libraries, even without the doubling rates, and without taking advantage of those services.
If there is a further suggestion that these properties are housing ill-gotten gains, that’s a matter for His Majesty’s Treasury rather than a local council.
There is a legitimate concern about property held by offshore corporations. A recent paper by the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that 15 per cent of residential properties priced over £5mn and, for the most part, concentrated in central London, were held by such vehicles. But it builds a curious picture of the nameless absentee investor class.
Using Land Registry data alongside leaks from sources such as the Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers, the researchers extrapolated that 11 per cent is held by owners from the UAE, followed by South Africa at 7 per cent. Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia are at 5 per cent. Russia is surprisingly far down the list. But the top of the list for ownership are British citizens who’ve “round-tripped” via an offshore company, accounting for nearly 15 per cent of beneficial owners.
We are free to whinge about the moneyed classes, British or otherwise, who leave their properties empty. If they aren’t here, they are hardly going to see the collective sneering. But report them? They are perfectly within their rights not to come to London if they don’t feel like it.
The sour note in the council statement is the attack on the “international”.
Immigrants, be they refugees or international elite, have both been charged with breaking the British housing market. The government has recently launched a renewed attack on the small boats. Now Westminster Council is taking on the big boats — the yacht-owning classes.
Who is next to have a hotline deployed against them?
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