• I AM grateful to Councillor Oliver Cooper for inspiring me to put pen to paper for his audacity in accusing Camden of “landlord delinquency”, (Council plan to seize empty properties, March 28). I welcome, therefore, the opportunity to balance out the moral compass on housing.

Let me begin with Right to Buy receipts. Being forced to hand back Right to Buy receipts to the Treasury coffers after being forced to sell precious council homes at obscene discounts, where a third are now buy-to-lets. That might qualify as government delinquency.

Others might choose to call it legalised theft, especially since the historic housing debt has effectively been bought back by local housing authorities around 2010, which means it is rent receipts and council tenants who are servicing those debts and not central government.

Also, being handed back just 2 per cent in housing grants and making those grants conditional on (un)affordable market rents. I would say all that qualifies as government delinquency.

A Tory government, first starving council homes from capital investment, and then revenue funding as well, by forcing us to reduce rents year on year, then having the audacity of pointing the finger to justify ideological privatisation agendas.

A Tory government encouraging a broken housing market which looks at housing through the narrow lens of a commodity instead of a home; stoking the artificial housing bubble which bursts every decade or so like clockwork; leaving thousands trapped in negative equity, forced into bankruptcy and then left homeless, leaving councils to pick up the cost.

The unspoken housing economy, awash with laundered foreign cash, which in turn leads to thousands of “investment” homes, all with darkened windows kept empty by property speculators.

All that, while Tory councils like Barnet have been forced by a Tory government to spend over £1.5million of taxpayers’ money in sweeteners to private landlords to house the homeless; which might qualify as delinquency for Barnet – the “easy council”. One can’t help but wonder how many of those private landlords are Tory councillors – former rogue ones or otherwise.

In the meantime here in Camden we have built the largest number of brand new council homes in London, which we do count as empty while they are being prepared to be let to tenants at genuinely social rents – apparently a sin in Cllr Cooper’s mind.

So I will not take any lessons on landlord delinquency from the Tories. Not here in Camden, and certainly not from a ridiculed Tory government in Westminster, at war with itself, merely surviving on borrowed time.

I would politely suggest that Cllr Cooper focuses his razor-sharp mind to scrutinising Tory government delinquency in the next weeks and months instead… assuming, of course, the said government can last that long.

CLLR MERIC APAK
Cabinet Member for Better Homes