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An Englishman's Home Is No Longer His Castle

This article is more than 9 years old.

At least it won't be if Islington manage to have their way. In what appears to be a very bizarre attempt at micromanaging the London housing market they've decided to start threatening people with jail if they buy a house and then don't live in it. And they're gathering their information about whether someone is living in it in a very odd manner, too. But the most important point really is that property is property. You own something then you get to do as you will with it. If you can't do what you will then in a certain sense then you don't in fact own that thing. So this is another step along that road of killing off the idea of private property altogether:

Property investors who leave homes empty just to make money from property price rises could be fined or even jailed under proposals made by a London council.

Islington plans to force owners of newly built homes to prove they are occupied. If homes are left empty for longer than three months owners will face high court injunctions which if breached, could bring fines, repossession and, in the worst cases, jail for owners, the council said.

That really is a bit harsh. For a start it can take longer than three months to find a suitable tenant. But leave that aside: if people wish to leave a house empty, given that they own that house then they've a perfect, nay an absolute, right to do so. Just because that local council isn't issuing enough planning permissions for new homes doesn't seem to be a good enough reason to overturn this most basic right to the ownership of those things that, umm, one owns.

But what really puzzles is the following:

According to council research, as many as a third or more of homes in some new developments are potentially vacant. Of almost 2,000 units built in blocks in the borough since 2008, 30% have no registered voters and the percentage rises considerably when social housing is filtered out and market housing analysed. Of the 58 private apartments in the 1 Lambs Passage development, 71% had no voter registered, while 65% of the 106 in Worcester Point had no one registered.

Even taking into account apartments where students are registered for council tax exemption, or the leaseholder appears to have let the property to a tenant who may not be eligible to vote, and cases where the flat is being operated as a serviced apartment, there are still high levels of unexplained non-registration. Forty-five per cent of the 127 market units in the Bezier building in the borough fall into that category, as do 33% in the Worcester Point building.

That really is extremely strange. London's a city simply packed to the rafters with immigrants (by far the largest centre of immigrants in the country) so to use voters as a proxy for residents is simply most strange.

There is one saving grace to this policy. It's got absolutely nothing at all to do with properties that already exist. What is actually being proposed is a change in the terms of planning permissions that might be issued in the future. And given that anyone buying in that future will be able to find out that these terms exist then it's not a "taking" in that US constitutional sense. It really is still most odd though. What is it about "private property" that the local council doesn't get here?

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