Post by Focus on Jul 13, 2013 8:00:39 GMT
Knocking at a cream-painted terrace house in a suburb near Heathrow Airport, Matthew Robinson was a man on a mission.
‘Council here!’ he shouted through the front door. ‘We want to inspect your shed in the back garden.’
A few minutes later, the official from Hounslow Council had his suspicions confirmed.
Behind the house was a jerry-built shack thrown together with breeze blocks — and distinct signs of human habitation.
Crowded : A Hounslow street is pictured, its sheds highlighted, some of which are being investigated by the council for housing migrants
Outside it, on the grass, lay a crate full of empty beer cans. On the roof was a Sky dish, and a gas flue had been knocked through the wall to carry away fumes from a cooker inside.
The cramped outbuilding is home to eight Indians, including a woman, who pay hundreds of pounds a month to a rogue landlord who owns a thriving grocery shop a few miles away.
These impoverished immigrants — who were not in ‘residence’ but had gone out for the day — are just a few of the countless thousands now living in so-called ‘beds in sheds’ in back gardens across London’s suburbs and the Home Counties.
They represent the sad human face of Britain’s struggle to accommodate the huge numbers of immigrants arriving here every month.
Only this week, it was revealed that the number arriving from the EU was undercounted by the Office for National Statistics by 600,000 over a 13-year period.
It means that immigration between 1997 and 2010 was nearly four million.
As Hounslow councillor Sheila O’Reilly says: ‘Once, it was a rural scene around here. Now, many areas resemble shanty towns.
Spot check : Council officers in Hounslow carry out checks on houses believed to have outbuildings being rented out for people to live in - so called beds-in-sheds
'There are 20,000 gardens with ramshackle sheds or outbuildings of all sizes, a lot of them rented out illegally.
‘The main problem is that we have let so many people into this country in such a short time that we do not have the accommodation for them.’
In Hounslow, the official population figure from the 2011 census is close to 250,000 — but Councillor O’Reilly thinks the true number is 300,000.
‘There may easily be 50,000 people living in beds in sheds in this borough alone. They are in gardens everywhere — even the posh parts of Hounslow.’
The shed-renting has reached such a crisis that the council has set up a special squad to tackle the problem.
Matthew Robinson, a planning enforcement officer, is part of the team who conduct dawn raids and inspections on houses believed to contain bed-sheds.
When discovered, some are torn down because they break planning rules. All too often though, red tape and lax laws mean that the landlord receives only a warning.
Other London boroughs and towns close to the capital have begun similar action.
In neighbouring Ealing, council leader Julian Bell believes that ‘beds in sheds’ occupants have pushed the borough population up by 60,000 to nearly 400,000.
And council officials in Slough, Berkshire — where there are 3,000 of these shacks, sometimes sheltering ten people each — have hired a ‘spy in the sky’ plane with thermal-imaging equipment to detect humans living in outbuildings.
But the true figures are hard to quantify. Many of the people are in Britain illegally and live under the radar. They will not have taken part in the latest 2011 census.
Cramped : A picture shows four or five large outbuildings which Hounslow officials checked in case they are housing migrants
The result, however, is easy to see.
Hounslow schools are bursting at the seams. Since September, 26 new ‘bulge’ classrooms have had to be created at primary schools alone to cater for nearly 800 extra pupils.
Many are children of newly-arrived migrants living in ‘beds in sheds’ and others are from families moved out of Central London to cut housing benefit costs.
In Slough, an extra 400 children have suddenly arrived at primary schools in the past two years, and the town is planning thousands of new secondary school places.
GP and other health services, rubbish collection and the sanitation system are all reeling under the burden. Back in Hounslow this week, the ‘beds in sheds’ squad, including two police officers, targeted 15 houses in a known hot-spot for illegal immigrants.
An aerial photograph of the street shows clearly that many of the 1930s terrace houses have a large outbuilding in its garden.
Any suspicious-looking shack is being investigated. It is possible that more than 1,000 immigrants could be living secretly in this street alone.
Steve Curran, the councillor in charge of Hounslow’s planning and housing committee, joined us on our visit to this road.
He said that criminal landlords were making a profit at the expense of vulnerable people who are trapped into living in cramped conditions with unsafe wiring, damp, and inadequate sanitation while paying hundreds of pounds a month in rent.
Councillor Curran explained that the bed-shed team had already visited 2,083 properties and one in five needed further investigation.
No home : One shed that appears to have been used as a house looks as though it is being demolished after visits from the council
But the council has a tough job proving that the sheds are being lived in — despite the aerial photos and extensive proof of human habitation such as cooking facilities and rubbish.
Under the law, officials can target only sheds of more than 25 square metres, so small sheds — often the most squalid — escape unscathed.
The council must also give home-owners 24 hours’ notice of an inspection, which, of course, gives landlords ample time to clear out a back-garden shack.
One council official said: ‘When they know we are coming, they run like mice between the shed and the main house, moving everything they can.
'Cleverly, they’ll even rent gym equipment for 24 hours to put in the shed to try to deceive us into thinking it is an exercise room.’
Marilyn Smith, the council’s development manager, confirmed that people quickly hide signs of life.
She says: ‘The landlords tell us all sorts of things: that the shed is a Muslim prayer room; a place to wash the children’s football kit; or it’s for occasional family parties.
'But our schools, our health service and the infrastructure of the borough cannot cope with the numbers of people drawn to live in them.’
She says the council is making progress in stopping what she calls ‘opportunists’ who try it on by renting out a shed.
Home from home : A police officer checks out the outbuilding of a house in Hounslow which council officials suspected of being used as a dwelling
The real problem, though, is rogue landlords who turn this accommodation into profitable businesses.
Some own as many as 20 houses in one street, cramming immigrants into each room of the main house and then renting out the garden shed or sheds, too.
Apparently, corner houses are favoured because they have bigger gardens with room for more sheds.
I accompanied the council’s inspection team as they visited a landlord at just such a property. He owns three houses in the next-door street to the one we had just visited. In the houses, 12 or more rooms are let out individually, many to newly-arrived migrants from India.
The big back garden contains four sheds, three of them currently in use — one by an older lady who doesn’t speak English, and two by families who pay £420 each a month in rent.In one shed, we found 28-year-old Mendeep and her three-year-old daughter, Hardiw.
Mendeep works in a shop in nearby Southall, while her husband has a job at Heathrow. They moved here from Reading, where they first lived after coming to Britain from India in 2009.
Mendeep said she was happy with her shed accommodation.
‘It has two rooms and a bathroom, and it is near the nursery school where my daughter will start in September. Next door is another family of three from India.
‘We are used to this kind of living, and I am not worried about being in a back garden.’
Extraordinarily, her landlord is unlikely to be forced to close his ‘establishment’, since he tells the council inspectors that all the sheds are more than four years old — which means, under the law, they cannot be torn down.
But not all Basic : The kitchen of one of the 'sheds' being used as homes in Hounslow
Mourad Slimani, 38, arrived from Egypt 21 years ago and initially lived in Bayswater, central London. He got married a couple of years ago to Meriam, 28, a fellow Egyptian.
The couple, who were expecting their first baby, wanted to move out of London and looked for a studio flat in Hounslow.
Mourad, who works nights at a John Lewis warehouse, says he approached a Muslimstani estate agent in Hounslow who said he had found him a place owned by a fellow Muslimstani in a ‘posh area’.
‘We signed a flimsy sort of contract agreeing to pay £700 a month to live in Osterley, but were horrified when we arrived in the middle of winter.
‘The “studio flat” was a shed with damp on the walls, bugs all over the floor and a smell of sewage. There was no heating or hot water unless you asked the landlord, who lived in the detached house, to turn it on.’
Mourad’s wife ended up having a still-birth, which doctors said was due to the dreadful living conditions.
Today, with the help of Councillor O’Reilly, they have moved into a one-bedroom flat in Hounslow, rented to them by a reputable estate agent, and have a new baby son, Abdullah, who is six months old.
Mourad is still furious: ‘I am a Muslim, but the Muslimstani landlord who shares my faith was a bad man to put us in a shed. Such people are cheating thousands of people.’
As Mourad vents his anger, another aeroplane lowers out of the sky as it prepares to land at nearby Heathrow — among its passengers, perhaps, yet more immigrants who have been enticed to this country . . . only to find that the only accommodation available is a cramped and expensive shed.
No bloody wonder they are so hard to find ffs - I'll be keeping a close eye on my shed from now on I can tell you!! - Fx
