The "Azizification" of London housing
Fire brigade inspections, dubious safety certificates, and a landlord telling Sadiq Khan that it's business as usual.
Coverage of Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital went mainstream this week, with news outlets across the political spectrum covering the mass evictions that London Centric has been reporting on for weeks. There’s increasing political pressure, from central government down to the mayor of London’s office and local councils to get a grip on the issue.
One politician fighting the evictions told London Centric he now has concerns about the wider “Azizification” of the London property market. Merton councillor Stuart Neaverson defined this trend as “the process by which a landlord evicts longstanding tenants in order to relet their flats to councils as more profitable temporary accommodation”.
Start this edition up top with updates on the fight by hundreds of Londoners to remain in their homes – or scroll down to read stories about the concern over David Attenborough’s north London foxes, the latest on the red vs blue school wars, a London property with its own tunnel network, and the man talking the capital down while trying to sell a £175m Knightsbridge penthouse.
Criterion Capital’s mass evictions: What you need to know
Did Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital issue fake electrical safety certificates to its tenants? It’s a week since London Centric asked the billionaire’s company this question. They have yet to respond. But now Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has weighed in and said he shares our concerns.
Landlords who fake electrical safety certificates can be fined up to £40,000 per flat by local councils – and the residential towers owned by Criterion contain hundreds of flats.
London Centric has seen five electrical safety certificates given to tenants in Criterion-owned buildings. Despite being issued in recent months, they were signed by an electrician who went out of business three years ago. When we visited the electrician’s registered address in Greenwich, we found an empty shop unit leased by an unrelated company. Several of the tenants, some of them paying £1,700/month for a one bed flat, said they had not let anyone into their properties to do the tests on the days they were issued. The paperwork was identical at all the flats, across two entirely separate buildings, with no reference to the actual electrical connections in the flats.
Now Sadiq Khan’s spokesperson has told London Centric: “The mayor is concerned about reports of potentially fake electrical certificates issued to residents. City Hall is supporting boroughs to investigate any breaches of housing law that might be putting Criterion tenants at risk.”
A spokesperson for Merton council, where some of the affected properties are located, said they were “worrying allegations” that they are reviewing with partner agencies.
Merton’s chief executive has also asked Criterion to explain why it is evicting tenants, among other concerns about Aziz’s properties: “We have also requested information relating to the maintenance of the tower to ensure that the appropriate safety measures are in place. We also understand that the London Fire Brigade are shortly carrying out a fire safety inspection of the communal areas in the building too.”
Although Criterion has yet to acknowledge any problems with the safety certificates in its flats, in recent days we’ve had reports from tenants facing eviction that Criterion employees have been accessing their flats without permission in order to conduct new safety tests.
From the Telegraph to the Independent, people are waking up to the impact that Criterion Capital has on so many aspects of London life. The Financial Times’ Josh Gabert-Doyon wrote a brilliant piece on the mass evictions, identifying yet another Criterion-controlled residential building where private tenants are being evicted ahead of the Renters’ Rights Act.
He met a Ukrainian refugee with a disabled child who is being evicted by the Aziz family’s business to make way for temporary accommodation.
“It’s a more lucrative business for [the landlord]” said Oleksandr Shyrokov.
Lawyers for Criterion previously told London Centric the evictions are legal and “part of a standard asset management process to regularise occupation terms”.
Last week youth homelessness charity Centrepoint cut ties with the Aziz family’s charitable foundation and turned down a planned donation from them. Now, we understand that Opportunity London, the influential government-backed organisation that works with big businesses to promote investment in the capital, has also ended its partnership with Criterion Capital.
Last week Sadiq Khan wrote personally to Asif Aziz asking for swift answers on the evictions. Aziz replied directly to Sadiq Khan – and told the mayor of London the evictions are going full steam ahead and blamed the media for politicising a legitimate series of business transactions. Once again, it’s a sign of how little power the mayor of London has to intervene directly on the ground beyond public statements and trying to coordinate responses with local councils.
We’re still trying to track down the mysterious individuals who went door-to-door giving Criterion tenants false hope last week that the evictions would be called off. If you work at Criterion, you can contact us in confidence. We’re very grateful to all the sources helping us with our reporting. You know who you are.
If there’s one thing that’s come out of this story, it’s that London’s political leaders are waking up to the risk posed by what local councillor Stuart Neaverson dubbed the “Azizification” of the capital’s housing market.
Councils have a legal obligation to help some homeless people, which they often meet by placing people in temporary accommodation units at great expense. This process sees vast sums of public money flow from local authorities to landlords – often giving property owners more money than they can earn by providing long-term leases to private renters.
Now, London Councils, the body that represents all local authorities in the capital, has written to Asif Aziz warning they are considering refusing to use Criterion as a temporary accommodation provider. This could undermine the entire financial rationale for the mass evictions and potentially cost Aziz’s company millions of pounds.
The letter to Aziz was signed by a cross-party coalition of the capital’s housing leads (Labour’s Grace Williams, the Conservatives’ Lynne Hale, and the Liberal Democrats’ Jim Millard). They state that local authorities in the capital have a “responsibility and a financial imperative” to discourage landlords who “exacerbate London’s homelessness crisis”.
The trio told Aziz that their councils have previously refused to work with housing providers who engage in poor practices: “If the reports of the approach being taken by Criterion are accurate, we will be forced to consider whether a similar approach is necessary with regards to any temporary accommodation that might be made available by Criterion.”
The councillors told Criterion: “Our councils would view it as unacceptable if a major landlord is seeking to unnecessarily evict tenants in secure accommodation on a large scale in order to profit from London’s homelessness crisis.”
And finally, last week lawyers Carter-Ruck claimed Asif Aziz had reported London Centric editor Jim Waterson to the police for unspecified offences. This was after Waterson visited the billionaire’s office and home to ask if he was pushing ahead with the evictions. The Met police press office said they have no record of such incidents being reported to the authorities.
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Red vs blue school wars: Arrests for “encouraging or assisting” a crime.
There was a big reaction to Tuesday’s story on the viral “school wars” trend. While we heard from lots of London Centric readers who felt the posts played into tropes about the capital’s supposedly crime-ridden reputation, others wrote in to say that they had reported brawls involving schoolchildren to the police in recent days.
When we asked the Met why those incidents hadn’t been linked to the “school wars,” they told us that not every fight in London could be chalked up to the trend, and that an officer would need to investigate fully to establish why any fight had broken out.
On Wednesday evening, the Met confirmed that two people have been arrested in connection with the trend. The suspects, a man aged in his 20s and a boy aged 15, were arrested in Central East London on 1 March on suspicion of “encouraging or assisting in a crime”.
Preposterous property of the week
You’d hope that shelling out £3,999,995 in London’s housing market would mean that your new four-bedroom property on the edge of Blackheath might come adorned with a few bells and whistles, such as a sauna or cinema room.
In this case, that price tag gives you access to something slightly different: a Grade II listed modernist house with a rare network of sand tunnels. The tunnels were initially dug to extract sand for use in the glass industry back in the 18th century, before being used as a bomb shelter during World War 2.
Any prospective buyer would not only be living in the only private home of renowned architect Julian Sofaer, but would have access to “numerous murals and sand sculptures that have been engraved over the centuries.”
Are David Attenborough’s London foxes under threat?
Back in January, north London’s foxes played a starring role in David Attenborough’s latest documentary Wild London. Filmed sniffing at the broadcaster’s hand, eating discarded chips from a carton, and wrestling against a Fiat Panda, the wild creatures were much loved.
But now, two months after they found fame alongside the capital’s pigeons and peregrine falcons, are Attenborough’s foxes under attack?
This week, a Tottenham residents’ WhatsApp chat has been abuzz with concern for the vulpines, after the discovery of two dead foxes (and a dead cat) in back gardens close to the allotments where parts of Wild London were filmed.
Residents quoted a Haringey council worker saying there had been “several” dead fox reports in the area, prompting panic that someone was poisoning the animals filmed for Attenborough’s show.
Over the last month, other dead foxes have been reported to Haringey Council. We asked Haringey Council, as well as Veolia, who the council subcontracts out waste management to, if they had noticed an uptick in dead foxes. The council declined to comment.
When London Centric went to check if the vulpines were in fact still alive, we found plenty of evidence of their continued existence, with several rubbish bins upturned and packets of nibbled Ritz crackers strewn across the street.
Helena, 32, found the dead cat in her garden on Monday: “I thought the cat was sleeping, but it wasn’t moving. I went out to check on it and it was completely unaffected other than a bit of blood around the mouth. It was horrible. Just really sad.”
Following the incident, her one-eyed white and ginger feline named Ugi is no longer allowed outdoors. She thought the culprit wasn’t a local fox murderer, but more likely poorly placed rat poison.
She’d found a dead rat in her garden last year, and said the area was known to have a rodent problem: “It’s not necessarily someone wanting to kill foxes but people not being sensible about where they put rat poison down.”
And finally…
This week has seen a strange proxy war break out over a real war, with current Londoners trading barbs with ex-Londoners who have given up on the city and moved to Dubai.
One of those joining in was Nick Candy, who made his name as a London property developer (and husband of one-time pop star Holly Valance). Candy, who spends an increasing amount of time in the Gulf while also serving as treasurer of Reform UK, is entitled to his opinion. But it’s also a bold stance from someone who is still trying to find a buyer for his own £175m duplex penthouse in the One Hyde Park development he built with his brother in Knightsbridge.
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"A spokesperson for Merton council, where some of the affected properties are located, said they were “worrying allegations” that they are reviewing with partner agencies."
One other thing that I hope this work surfaces is that councils have been so short of funds that funding for essential oversight and enforcement services has been decimated. Individual officers are doing the best they can, but it seems there isn't the capacity for these basic functions to be delivered effectively.
I reported people illegally extending their gardens onto council-owned land to Merton years ago. My report got passed around and nothing ever happened, presumably because there wasn't the resource or prioritisation to actually do anything about it. Still angers me that public land has been appropriated in this way.
"... last week lawyers Carter-Ruck claimed Asif Aziz had reported London Centric editor Jim Waterson to the police for unspecified offences... The Met police press office said they have no record of such incidents being reported to the authorities"
Inform the Law Society and Bar Council. Making up threats in legal notices is in breach of their professional code of ethics