Westminster City Council sells five homes for £1.9m at auction

By Julia Gregory, Local Democracy Reporter

A central London council has been criticised for selling five homes for £1.9m at auction, despite the ongoing pressures to house vulnerable people.

The properties sold last month include a one-bedroom home in Claverton Street in Pimlico which went for £543,000, and three studio flats in Gloucester Terrace in Bayswater.

Between them the three flats which were sold through two property auctioneers fetched £1m.

Westminster City Council said it has sold 162 homes since 2014 – mainly studio flats and homes with one-bedroom accommodation.

The council said it uses the money “to purchase larger properties on the open market to meet the needs of families on our waiting list”.

The July sales were revealed by residents who monitor property sales and highlighted the number of buildings the council has put on the market in Gloucester Terrace.

The street features distinctive white stucco buildings – most of them built by George Kingdom between 1843 and 1852 to house middle class Victorians, their families and their servants as London expanded.

Paul Atherton, who is one of the 266 homeless people the council has given housing to during the “everybody in” scheme, said: “This demonstrates again that there is no connected thinking between housing, selling and revenue. The focal point should be homes.

“If they have got housing that’s available and ready for people to move into, that should be the priority.”

Maggie Carman, Bayswater ward councillor, said she was concerned about “the tendency to lose local homes for local people”.

She added: “Bayswater has become unaffordable for ordinary working people.”

One of the studio flats near Porchester Square, which went for £280,000, was marketed with a 125-year lease with attractions including a kitchenette and bathroom, and located close to Royal Oak Underground station.

Two years ago a studio flat in the same road went for £330,000.

Adam Hug, who leads the Labour opposition, wants the council to be clearer about its reasons for selling homes rather than repairing them.

He said there was a demand for small flats, particularly as councils try to find homes for homeless people brought in off the streets as part of the “everybody in” scheme to protect them from coronavirus.

He said the council “needs to ensure that the money gets clearly and quickly funnelled back into delivering more and better social housing”.

But he added that he was concerned that “this approach often has the effect of un-mixing communities by selling off street properties dotted across the borough and the money being used to support infill, the buy-back of right to buy or new build on Westminster’s housing estates”.

Housing activist Peter Denton said: “One sold is one too many.”

He said too many properties can subsequently get sold on for a profit and are taken out of the social housing stock.

A Westminster City Council spokesman said it was committed to providing 1,850 new affordable homes across the borough as part of its City For All plan.

He said: “It is vital that we build the right type of home to meet our residents’ needs.

“The five auctioned properties are either studio or one-bedroom flats, which do not address our need to provide two and three-bedroom homes for families on our waiting list.

“All were subject to a robust business case before the decision was made to put them up for sale.”

The money from the sale goes towards “the delivery of better social housing”.

He said the council has bought 115 new properties, mainly homes with two, three and four bedrooms, to add to its housing stock. Sales are agreed for a further 11 homes.

The new homes have 341 bedrooms in all, compared with 173 bedrooms in the homes it has sold, he added.

Pictured top: Gloucester Terrace in Westminster, where the council has sold three properties (Picture: Google Street View)