Housing Issues
Subletting
I was fully aware that there are some sublet flats within my block, but it wasn't until recently, when I started knocking on doors trying to find other tenants whose flats are being affected by the lift noise disturbances with a view to putting together a class action lawsuit against the council, that I found out that the problem is way more serious that I could ever have imagined. Out of the 21 flats that are directly affected by this issue, I was only able to speak to the residents of 3 of them, because it did not matter how many times I went up and down the floors knocking on doors where I could clearly see someone was home as a result of there being lights on, no one would answer.
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It was only when I spoke to one of the few affected tenants who was
equally as frustrated about this problem as I am that I was able to find out why, and it would appear that this is because they are all subletting and won't answer the door for fear that the person knocking on the door might be a council inspector. I've since had many conversations with genuine tenants about this, and it would appear that at least 40% of the flats within David Lee point are being sublet, so I will make an educated guess that a similar number of Newham social housing properties are being sublet right across the borough. There was only one flat on my floor that was sublet for a while (which is no longer the case) so it never crossed my mind that the problem was this serious, and in view of the fact that subletting your council flat is something that could land you in prison, I would have thought that very few tenants would be willing to take the risk. However, now that I think about it, it really isn't that much of a risk because the inspectors they send out to try and catch these people are worse than useless, something I have seen first hand.
Several years back when there was a flat on my floor being sublet, there was an inspector visiting our block who had just finished checking that I was a legitimate tenant, then moved on to the sublet flat concerned just as one of the residents was leaving it for work. She asked him to identify himself which he obviously refused to do, and instead ran away from her as quickly as possible in a way that made it so obvious that he was subletting that he might as well have burst into a huge song and dance number accompanied by a 50 piece orchestra entitled "I'm subletting, I'm subletting, I'm subletting". But for some bizarre reason, she didn't see that as a reason to flag the property as a potential sublet, nor were any further investigations conducted.
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This is an issue that must be costing the council an absolute fortune, and there is no excuse for allowing this to happen within tower blocks or blocks or flats, because it would be easy to install the necessary surveillance equipment to catch people in these circumstances, but I'd be willing to guess that the sublet team are deliberately set up to fail, because the more flats that are subletting, the less people are complaining about the poor living conditions they have to put up with. If they got in experienced professionals to catch all the tenants subletting their flats, it would probably free up enough properties to clear the entire housing waiting list.