Is this "dishonest" property developer building on your roof?
James Gold was found to pose a "significant risk to the public". So how is he privatising council housing blocks across London and putting new flats on top of them?
Today London Centric is publishing an investigation into a property developer with a chequered record who has discovered a curious loophole which allows him to take control of council housing across the capital — and then build new private homes on the roof.
This sort of journalism takes an enormous investment of time, money and legal advice — all funded by members. But we believe it adds more to Londoners’ understanding of how the capital really works than any amount of clickbait journalism. Today’s piece is only available for paying subscribers but you can join now for 25% off — or you can take out a free trial.
Scroll down to read the main article — or first read some updates on some of our other stories.
The man behind the Batman mask on Westminster Bridge.
When London Centric investigated brazen illegal activity on Westminster Bridge last autumn it prompted a massive response. Members of parliament flooded our DMs to say how much they despaired about the state of the bridge next to their workplace and what the lack of enforcement said about the country.
Sergeant Darren Watson, the affable policeman interviewed at length in the piece, was frank about his lack of resources and how criminals would run the moment he was seen approaching the bridge.
By now you’ve probably seen his solution, which went viral over the weekend. Watson went undercover as Batman (with his colleague Abdi Osman as Robin) to arrest and secure the convictions of two men “for providing the facilities to gamble”. Eugen Stocia of no fixed address failed to turn up at court while Constica-Gherorghe Barbu of Herbert Road, Greenwich was fined £925 — a small amount given what they can earn from scamming tourists.
The Met police press release is accompanied by CCTV footage that shows the arrest in action, with a video quality that suggests it was filmed at a distance using a potato. This is one of the issues London Centric identified with the bridge. It has very little coverage from security cameras, as its status as a listed building makes them difficult to install in an architecturally sympathetic manner, so criminals know they can operate with relative impunity.
Do read the archive piece if you want to know about the man inside the Batman outfit.
Sadiq Khan will be given formal powers to overrule London councils on licensing issues, with the mayor promising more alfresco dining and late-night opening hours to boost the economy. But it could take a year for the relevant law giving him those powers to be passed by the central government.
As a result City Hall has now written to all 32 London councils asking them to get a move on and voluntarily implement such policies this summer. The problem is that there’s not much Sadiq Khan can actually do to reintroduce outdoor dining in Soho prior to getting his new powers beyond saying “please”.
It’s just the latest skirmish between an underpowered mayoralty and London’s councils that is paralysing the capital’s decision making. James O’Malley and Martin Robbins discussed the issue on their podcast this week following our reporting.
Police investigating gang attacks ask hardware shops: Has anyone bought a lot of red paint recently?
Almost every day London Centric’s readers send in WhatsApps with news of another red paint attack somewhere in the capital, where a house and neighbouring properties are disfigured as part of a suspected intimidation campaign by a triad-linked organised crime group. Last week saw fresh attacks in Walthamstow and another in Tooting, the home turf of mayor of London Sadiq Khan.
Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy has now been told by local police that they have seen eight separate red paint attacks in Waltham Forest alone. According to the local police, an officer is working on the case with support of intelligence teams. The police have visited all the addresses, collected material left behind by the gang, and visited local hardware shops to ask about any “repeat customers” buying large amounts of red paint.
Creasy told London Centric that it’s “good the police now do seem to recognise there’s a pattern” and she is “more concerned than ever that this is evidence of serious criminal activity in Walthamstow”. Her main worry is that this is still being treated as a local issue while she wants to make “the case for joining the dots” across the capital and the rest of the UK with potential involvement from the National Crime Agency.
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London Centric Investigates: The “dishonest” property developer building on Londoners’ roofs
By Cormac Kehoe and Jim Waterson
On the face of it, James Gold appears to be a successful young London property developer who is pioneering a new way to squeeze much-needed extra flats on the roofs of the capital’s council housing blocks.
But an investigation by London Centric has found that the man who is taking control of publicly-owned housing across the city was previously found by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors to be a “dishonest” individual who mishandled client funds and posed “a significant risk to the public”.
Gold is now using a legal loophole to privatise council housing. He stands to earn millions of pounds by building new flats on top of residents’ ceilings after making big promises that seemingly haven’t been fulfilled. Concerns have also been expressed that residents did not receive independent legal advice before they signed paperwork handing over their building to Gold, whose previous companies have left behind a string of angry customers.
Albert Campbell, an 81-year-old resident in one of Gold’s blocks in Tower Hamlets, said he felt hoodwinked into supporting the proposal: “He came to the building, said he’ll give us all this money and there’ll be no change to the service charges.”
According to the residents, Gold has a standard method to gain control of a block of council flats. First, he or his mother cold calls leaseholders and explains they have a little-known right to collectively buy the freehold of their property from their local council.
The freeholder, in these cases the local London borough, owns the land beneath each block of flats and is responsible for maintaining the overall structure and shared areas. The leaseholders are the people who own a lease on an individual apartment within the building, in these cases usually someone who has bought an ex-council flat.
An offer is made to leaseholders, in which Gold promises to pay thousands of pounds and pledge to handle the complicated legal process of buying the freehold from the local council. Gold also pledges to keep their service charges down and improve maintenance. In return he gains the “air rights” to build on the roof of each building.
Once a deal is completed and the council hands over control of the building, residents said that Gold’s promises often fade away as his focus shifts to getting planning permission to build on the roof. Leaseholders in one block complained their service charge was subsequently hiked to “unaffordable” levels, the level of maintenance was cut, and the promised cash lump sums never arrived.
The 39-year-old University of Cambridge law graduate has also transferred control of at least five ex-council blocks to an obscure tax haven company controlled by his mother. Many of the leaseholders affected said they were not aware of this overseas transfer until informed by London Centric.
In this way housing built with public funds to improve the lives of London’s poorest people has ended up controlled by an off-shore Isle of Man trust.
Housing activists believe this model could now be replicated on a broader scale across the city, as developers wise up to the potential of “air rights” on top of old council blocks to squeeze in highly-profitable private housing — and a new tactic that can be used to obtain development opportunities on the cheap.
Jonathan Moberly, a veteran East End housing activist, said he believes that this use of the collective right to buy a freehold “is offering a blueprint for scammers all over London to raid the publicly owned housing assets of local authorities”
“Failed to act in the best interests of his clients”
James Gold’s entrepreneurial career began early in his life. As a teenager in the mid-2000s he set up a party wall surveying company, which was bringing in hundreds of thousands of pounds a year by the time he was at university. After graduating he founded a summer school business which charged international students £3,600 for advice on how to get into Oxford and Cambridge universities.
His next venture was Landmark Lofts, which earned glowing reviews in the Daily Mail, the Times and the Evening Standard for its apparently revolutionary approach to loft conversion on domestic houses. The company claimed to be able to pre-fabricate its lofts offsite in Yorkshire, and install them on top of London houses in just 14 days. Gold’s business partners on this venture included big name London property developer Henry Smith, who featured in London Centric for evicting hundreds of people in Lewisham before Christmas. (Following the publication of this article Smith got in touch to emphasise that he stepped down from Landmark Lofts and sold his shares in the company in 2011, well before Gold received the damning verdict from his professional body.)
Behind Gold’s apparent financial and media success, however, there was a din of unhappy customers and some extraordinary claims.
In 2012 disgruntled clients of his surveying company went to the press and complained the business engaged in “ambulance chasing” marketing tactics. His university admissions summer school was also criticised for overplaying the involvement of Oxford and Cambridge academics without their permission.
Finally, his loft conversion business shut down amid damning online reviews when a group of furious customers complained to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors that they had lost tens of thousands of pounds. Gold was expelled from the prestigious organisation in 2022 after a disciplinary hearing found a number of breaches of professional conduct including conflicts of interest, not appropriately protecting client money and not returning money owed to clients.
The investigation concluded Gold had “deliberately created a conflict of interest” and “failed to act in the best interests of his clients”.
“His conduct fell far below the standards which society expects from professional persons,” the hearing found. “Mr Gold lacked integrity and was dishonest. Customers who had trusted him with their money were deceived.”
Gold failed to acknowledge the proceedings but the damning verdict was issued regardless. In any case, by then his focus had moved from putting lofts on private homes to building on top of London’s council houses.
“Leaseholders need to get independent advisors”
In September 2019, residents in Armsby House, a council-owned block in Whitechapel, east London, were approached by James Gold and his mother Roza with a proposition to buy their building’s freehold from the council, in a process known as “collective enfranchisement”. There is nothing unlawful about this but as an encouragement the Golds promised cash incentives to those who signed up. In one case leaseholders were told they would receive a modest cash sum of £500 up front, with the prospect of at least a further £4,000 to follow at a later date.
The Golds told the leaseholders that their intention was to add extra floors on top of the roof. This, the Golds said, would cause minimal disruption because of their “advanced offsite modular system”, similar to that used by his former loft construction business, where most of the work would be completed offsite and then transferred to Armsby House.
Although there was scepticism among some leaseholders, with many refusing to take part in the deal or objecting to the prospect of flats being built on the roof, for others this was overridden by the fear of missing out on a golden opportunity. Some of the leaseholders were absentee landlords who rented out their former council flats on the private market, so had less of a stake in the on-site living conditions. Others were elderly or not native-English speakers.
In any case, once 50% of the leaseholders signed up to Gold’s plan, the others had no choice but to follow. None of the leaseholders who spoke to London Centric had taken any independent legal advice, instead trusting Gold to sort out the paperwork in what appeared to be a win-win deal.
Board meetings of Tower Hamlets council’s housing division from 2023 reveal deep concerns about the details of Gold’s schemes, which were raising eyebrows among board members for how they were structured. The acting chief executive of Tower Hamlets Homes issued a warning: “Leaseholders need to get independent advisors and do due diligence”.
One of the individuals who signed up to the deal said she had only done so after allegedly being told by Gold’s mother Roza that the rest of the block had already joined the plan: “If I didn’t sign, I wouldn’t get the money and everyone else would.”
Years later, she told London Centric that everyone was still waiting for the cash.
“Massively iffy”
In the case of Armsby House, Gold set up a business called 1-24 Armsby House Freehold Limited with him as the only director. Each of the 12 participating leaseholders was then given a single share in this new company, on a one-leaseholder-one-vote basis. The new company then successfully applied to take ownership of the building’s freehold from Tower Hamlets council. On paper the leaseholders, aided by Gold, now had control over the future of their own building.
Yet while the process was going through, a mysterious Isle of Man-registered trust called Langness H1 was granted 100 shares in the newly-formed limited company that owned Armsby House’s freehold, diluting the stakes of the people who actually lived in or owned the flats. Many of the leaseholders said they had no idea about the involvement of the Isle of Man company, or that their stake had been diluted, until approached by this publication years after the transfer took place.
Leading housing lawyer Giles Peaker said: “The usual rule is that only leaseholders can be shareholders. It’s technically possible — but massively iffy — to have someone who isn’t a leaseholder as a shareholder.”
At the time of the deal there was no way of finding out who was behind the Isle of Man company that quietly took control of the block of flats. Now, thanks to transparency laws that came into effect following the invasion of Ukraine, we can tell that it is controlled by Roza Gold — the mother of James Gold and the same woman who London Centric was told went door-to-door convincing many of the leaseholders to join her son’s plan.
An identical approach was taken by the Gold family with at least four different council housing blocks across the capital.
James Gold, who was deemed to pose “significant risk to the public” over his failure to preserve client funds at his previous loft conversion business, told London Centric the shares had been issued in accordance with normal commercial terms relating to the acquisition of the freehold. He said: “The shares are held to ensure the company complies with the terms of the loan. These will be returned to the leaseholders upon the loan coming to an end.”
“What’s the point in them?”
When Tower Hamlets council handed over the freehold of Armsby House to Gold’s new company in 2022 it also stopped maintaining the communal areas and structure of the housing block. Gold appointed a new private contractor to take over the old council responsibilities. Leaseholders and tenants – both those who had signed up as part of Gold’s scheme and those who hadn’t — told London Centric their living situations began to worsen under the new operators.
One resident in her 70s described contacting the new private maintenance company about her flooded apartment, which she blamed on the structure of the overall building, only for them to claim that it wasn’t their responsibility. “What’s the point in them?” she asked, complaining the service charges had also increased.
Several leaseholders who had backed Gold’s proposal to take control of the building now exhibit buyer’s remorse. Tenants claim that Gold had originally promised that “your service charge will not increase for at least the next ten years”. But this did not hold. The leaseholders showed bills which had increased from £2,485 to £3,935 since the takeover.
Gold told London Centric the majority of the increased service charge at Armsby House was outside of his control due to the high cost of paying towards “an ageing estate heating system” while the elements within the control of the residents’ company only increased by 9% “which is below the London average”.
He also said the residents were benefiting from an “industry-leading service charge guarantee” and suggested the collapse in maintenance standards was related to leaseholders not paying on time: “We are very understanding and flexible with short-term individual issues but where leaseholders have not paid their service charge since 2022 it is unfair to expect everyone else in the building to continue to pay for their neighbours’ heating, bin collection and cleaning.”
Campbell, the long-term resident, said he regrets voting to transfer the property’s freehold away from the council, saying that the new management team had refused to fix his heating in the middle of winter: “I am 81, and I don’t have any heat in here, and I called them to come and check on my heater and they came, took one look and never came back.”
In response to these claims, Gold told London Centric the “overwhelming majority of leaseholders tell us that they are happy with the way in which their buildings are run” and the new arrangement means residents are free to change their block’s managing agents whenever they want.
“What can we do about it?”
Gold’s attempts to build the rooftop extension at Armsby House have so far failed to get past the planning stage — but he has had more success at other buildings across the capital.
One of them is Stafford Cripps House, a squat brick block of nine flats at the bottom of Globe Road in Bethnal Green. It was constructed in 1936 as part of a pre-war social housing development designed to lift local residents out of Victorian slum dwellings. Now its freehold is owned by a company that is in turn controlled by Roza Gold’s off-shore Isle of Man trust.
Gold successfully secured planning permission from Tower Hamlets council for a two-storey extension on the roof of Stafford Cripps and is now trying to sell the scheme to a different property developer for £950,000 — potentially opening up a massive payday for the property developer. By contrast, the leaseholders who spoke to London Centric, who made it possible by signing Gold’s legal paperwork, say they have yet to see any money, the quality of maintenance has decreased, and they are dreading the addition of the extra storeys.
One 26-year-old tenant, who has lived with her family in an ex-council flat in the block for her whole life, said her family didn’t back the plan and wouldn’t benefit: “I think it’s going to be really disruptive to our living environment, the noise is going to be crazy.”
Gold is working on at least six of these schemes across east and north London. He has a planning application for another two-storey extension in Bethnal Green pending, and is finalising the collective enfranchisement of a building in Shoreditch, which he has told leaseholders will be completed any day now.
Back at Armsby House, Albert Campbell said he wished the council still owned the freehold of the property: “Every year the charges are going up, going up, going up. What can we do about it?”
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So good to see Mr Gold and his mother Roza taken to task. We had a terrible experience with them. Roza was such a slick sales person. Promising the earth with no care about delivery, then followed up by her son James who had equal disdain when there were problems. I offered a meeting to discuss problems and was told. ‘I don’t have time for that’. Then when we sued and won in court James Golds parting shot was ‘Good luck getting the money’. He did pay in the end but as a ‘refund’ to reclaim the VAT?! And then when I refused to take down negative comments online he had his lawyers write a lengthy letter threatening to take me to the high court. I happily offered to change any inaccuracy but none were forthcoming coming. My last interaction from James Gold was a call out of the blue saying we were both ‘business people’ so what would it take for me to remove my comments. It is no surprise that years later the Gold family continue to leave a trail of distraction behind them.
I got so excited when I read the headline, thinking that Aziz was due his weekly beating. While I miss Spivus Callidus being taken to task, that you've dragged another one of these parasites into the good light of day is nothing short of remarkable. May your words be read by the powerful, even as you give voice to the powerless.