Millions of pounds lost as houses left to rot

 A 1000 Lambeth owned properties are being left vacant, resulting in £3.5m lost rental income every year.

 “I am shocked by this level of mismanagement,” says Conservative Parliamentary Candidate, Kemi Adegoke. “The £3.5m in lost rent is just the tip of the ice-berg in Labour’s failed management of our housing, locally and nationally. This could be spent on reduced rent and service charges. Local residents are punished for Labour’s incompetence.”

These properties could have been redeveloped to create homes for the 14,000 people on the housing waiting list. If they sold the properties this would have raised up to hundreds of millions of desperately needed funds.

 Letting properties become derelict makes streets ugly and increases antisocial behaviour. The council will not invest in developing these properties and refuses to sell them off swiftly, just leaving them there to rot.

“The Audit Commission has rightly fingered Lambeth Council and Lambeth Living,” says Kemi, “but the real problem lies with a Labour government obsessed with new and shiny things. Their high taxes on refurbishment have made it cheaper to build new than fix derelict properties and they restrict funding to new buildings.”

 Labour Lambeth Rewards Incompetence:

• Director of Housing Management – £100k per year + benefits
•  Director of Lambeth living £120k per year + benefits
• Consultants earning between £500 to £900 PER DAY – up to £4,000 per week!

The scandal in figures:

• 1,000 empty homes worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
• £3.5 million lost in rent EACH year.
• £9.9 million in uncollected tenant arrears.
• Doc1£20k added to postage costs this year after huge blunders with all of the borough’s leaseholders.