Episode 2 Council House Crackdown

I'm Michelle Ackerley.

My parents both grew up on council estates and, as a family,

we understand the difference social housing can make to people's lives.

But across the UK, there's a chronic shortage of

council and housing association homes.

I know so many friends

and so many people that just literally

don't have anywhere to live.

Adding to the crisis, some tenants are abusing the system,

holding on to properties they no longer need, or even worse,

unlawfully subletting them and coining in a small fortune.

Subletting social housing is wrong.

It's wrong. It's illegal and it's wrong.

So every day, we'll be with the

housing investigators as they crack down on those rogue tenants...

Country court bailiffs.

ELECTRIC DRILL

-..reclaim properties...

-Anybody in?

..and give them to families in genuine need.

All of those keys are yours.

Oh, don't cos you'll start me off again.

This is Council House Crackdown.

Our reporter, property expert Luke Doonan, also grew up

on a council estate.

And for the last six months, he's been working alongside

dedicated housing investigators who will stop at nothing

to track down every single tenant who's abusing the system.

Today, we're with investigators as a grandmother

appears in court, charged with illegally subletting her

council flat in a tenancy fraud spanning more than eight years.

The message is quite clear to her. She was very upset. She was crying.

Her family are upset. You know, just don't sublet your properties.

A man suspected of subletting his flat was exposed

when he gave an interview in a local paper,

revealing he was the landlord of a pub.

I think what changed his mind is when we told him

-that social housing fraud is a criminal offence.

-Yeah.

And the mystery of the family who disappeared

and left their flat abandoned for nearly two years.

-Anybody in?

-This is not what I expected. I'm speechless, actually.

Absolutely speechless.

It's estimated that 98,000 social housing properties in England

alone are being illegally sublet.

And with a desperate shortage of housing in many areas,

it costs councils an average of £18,000 a year for every

family housed in temporary accommodation.

All of which means...

The London Borough of Greenwich, with its rich, royal

and maritime traditions, a growing population,

and nearly 35,000 social housing properties.

Our first case is about a 60-year-old grandmother who

is at the centre of a tenancy fraud spanning more than eight years

and is now, finally, about to face justice.

This is Jacqueline Willoughby.

She's been living here, at this council flat,

for nearly 30 years, or at least that's what everyone thought.

In reality, she moved out in 2007

and has been cheating the system ever since.

Today, Mrs Willoughby is due to appear in court,

and we're with the housing officers as their investigation

reaches its conclusion.

Greenwich Council investigator Karen Evans is about to brief her

manager, Nigel Brown, about the case.

Jacqueline Willoughby. She's 60 years of age.

She brought her children up there.

The tenancy, she had for about 30 years,

so it was their, you know, their family home, if you like.

Then, in 2007, she met someone, got remarried

and moved out of her three-bedroom council flat.

She meets and marries a gentleman

who lives round the corner, basically.

She effectively leaves the property.

But instead of handing her keys back,

she let a family member stay there instead.

And, making things worse, investigators believe

she made a deliberate attempt to cover up her actions.

I believe that she has deprived the council of the use of that

property since, therefore, August of 2007.

She left the property and she continued to pay all of

the bills herself, all the rent payments and everything.

Any communication with the local authority was via her,

so she disguised the fact that she had left the property.

It was a deliberate act.

Tenants are obliged to inform the council or housing association

when they move out of their social housing property.

Failure to do so is a breach of their tenancy agreement.

No-one can pass a social housing tenancy on to another person,

not even a family member.

However, you can apply to take over a tenancy, and this will be

considered on the basis of whether the property meets your needs.

In 2014, seven years after Mrs Willoughby moved

out of the flat, the other relative also decided to leave.

But the family still didn't give the property back to the council.

Instead of giving the property back,

it was sublet to other people for a profit.

It was about double the rent that we were charging,

that was being paid by the subtenants.

What was the weekly rent on our property?

The rent was £127 a week.

And what's she been charging at in later years?

Monthly it's £1,000, nearly £1,100.

Thanks to new legislation,

investigators were able to look into Mrs Willoughby's bank records

and see exactly how much money was going into her account.

Some was even marked rent and bills.

Over several months, thousands of pounds had gone into her account.

Over the years, it amounted to approximately £13,000.

So really, for the last seven years or so,

she's been subletting her tenancy, and we've had to house other

people because of the fact she's deprived us of our own property.

She's taken that property and kept it for herself,

decided who she wants to live in there

instead of returning it to us.

By holding on to a flat she wasn't entitled to, Mrs Willoughby

was stopping someone else from having a home of their own.

Not only that, but the council had to pay a much higher rate

to house someone in temporary accommodation.

As a result, somebody on our housing waiting list has had to be housed in

alternative accommodation at a far greater cost each week.

So, yeah, the amount of money involved from the time we say

she left the property, something in the region of £102,000 in losses.

But that wasn't all.

After six years of misusing her property,

the tenant was about to make her biggest mistake.

In 2013, she applied to buy the family flat under the

Right to Buy scheme, and in doing so, tried to fraudulently claim

a huge discount on the market value of her home.

Coming up, we find out what happens

when Mrs Willoughby is confronted with her criminal activity in court.

-So what has Mrs Willoughby been charged with?

-Four counts of fraud.

I can understand some people subletting

because they've gone and moved away for six weeks

and want to come back and can't afford to keep it

over that period of time.

But to hear that they're subletting just for money, I don't...

No, they should be definitely kicked out

and have to repay back that money.

It shouldn't be seen as an income generator for someone

privately that can afford it. They should move off the system.

There's plenty of other ways that they can probably make their money.

Take it off them and then, what do you call,

let the taxman crawl up their backside,

looking through their accounts and get the money back off them.

Because at the end of the day, as a taxpayer,

you and I have been robbed.

Since the government first recognised the need for

social housing after the First World War,

council homes have been built in a huge variety of shapes,

sizes and locations.

Here in the village of Beare Green in Surrey,

some of these bungalows are part of the local housing association stock.

In our next case, housing officers suspected that one of their tenants,

a 63-year-old man, was renting this bungalow out and living elsewhere.

The facts only came to light

when he couldn't resist giving an interview to a local newspaper.

Luke's gone to meet fraud manager Steve Baker

from Mole Valley Council.

It was a tip-off from neighbours that first alerted Steve that

all was not well.

-The housing association received a tip-off from another tenant.

-OK.

And they pass that information on to us, which is

what they do on all of their

suspicious social housing fraud cases now.

We received information that our tenant in the property wasn't

actually living there,

and they believed he was subletting to another young couple.

Steve's first step was to make an unannounced visit at the property.

We're just coming into the village now where the property's located.

This is quite stunning, isn't it?

I mean, I'm sure there are so many people that wouldn't even

dream that you would have social housing in this location.

It's a real, proper country village, isn't it?

Yeah, and we're right next to a station as well.

As you can see, it's a lovely area.

A property in this area for the council to build would probably

cost about £200,000.

And we have people who are waiting to be housed

in these sort of properties.

Of course, yeah. It's quite idyllic, isn't it?

I mean, I know it's a one-bedroom bungalow,

but you've got your own front garden, it looks like it's

got a back garden. It's quite stunning, really.

When housing officers first visited the bungalow, there was no-one in,

so they left a card asking their tenant to contact them.

Then they started to carry out some basic checks using

council records.

The important thing for us was to try

and find out where he was living, if indeed he was living somewhere else.

So initially, we did a check of a lot of our internal records.

We checked our council tax, electoral registration,

housing benefits.

And we also did some credit checks on the property.

At first, everything seemed in order.

The tenant was the only person on the electoral register and had

been paying council tax at the bungalow for the past seven years.

But financial checks revealed six of the names had had

links to the house, including a bank current account, credit card

and phone company connected to a young couple who seemed to

have been there until two months previously.

Everything was still showing him as registered at the address

and the credit checks showed a few people as potentially being

there, but nothing that really could be followed up.

To some degree, we'd hit a bit of a brick wall on this one

and weren't able to go any further.

But investigators have a variety of tools available to them

to make checks on suspected housing cheats.

And in this case,

it was a simple internet search that gave the team their breakthrough.

Steve discovered the tenant's name online in a

news story about a flood in Dorking town centre.

I thought, "We'll just do a Google check on his name,

"see if anything comes up."

And we actually came up with a news story.

The news story was in relation to a flood in a street in

Mole Valley, in the Dorking area,

and our man was quoted as being the landlord of a local pub.

There was nothing to stop the tenant having a job in a pub,

but being named as the landlord did potentially link their tenant

to that address.

And that was enough of a reason for Steve to investigate

whether in fact he was also living there.

This is the news article that appeared on the Google site.

READS: Landlord of the nearby pub says,

"It's really dangerous. During the day,

"people notice it and can avoid it.

"But at night-time, you could just go right into it and hurt yourself."

He's talking about some kind of flood damage to a road, I believe,

but clearly his name's there.

Yes, we had no idea he was working as well.

And obviously, we had him

registered as being a tenant of another address.

Armed with this extra information, Steve examined council records.

And investigating who paid the council tax of the pub

was about to give them a lead.

What I did is I spoke to our council tax section, who deal with

the business rates as well as the council tax registers,

and asked them what they had at the pub and who they had registered.

They didn't have our man registered there.

However, the pub did have a flat above the pub...

-Ah, OK.

-..and that was registered in the name of a woman.

She was listed as the manager of the pub who divided her time

between the pub's flat and her own home in Dorking.

With evidence growing that their tenant

was linked to the pub's address,

the team used new legislation to access his financial history.

And Steve found he'd applied for loans

using the woman's home address.

Once we knew the property that he may be linked to,

-we did some further credit checks on the address...

-Yeah.

And what they actually showed was that our man was

registered for two loans at the lady's address.

If he'd been living at the address he says he was living at,

-why is he taking out finance at a different address?

-Yeah.

The financial links to his girlfriend's address gave

investigators enough evidence to justify a further visit to the

tenant's bungalow to see if they could get an explanation.

But when they arrived,

they were greeted by a man who said he was a friend of the tenant.

When we knocked on the door, the door was answered

by someone we weren't expecting,

who was another male, aged about 45 to 50,

said he was just staying over a few days

while the tenant was helping him out.

But the man did confirm

that the tenant's girlfriend was the manager of the pub in Dorking.

Steve and the team left a message asking for

the tenant to get in touch.

And it wasn't long before they heard from him.

We left a card for our tenant, and within a couple of days,

the tenant had actually phoned us back and queried what was

going on and arranged to come down to the office to see us.

-So he contacted you pretty quickly?

-That's right.

So we organised an interview with him.

When the tenant came into the council offices,

he was shown the financial evidence linking him to the

woman at the pub and her house in Dorking.

The tenant denied living at either address

and subletting his bungalow over a number of years.

First of all, we told him what our suspicions were.

We told him we didn't think he was living there

and he was illegally subletting the property.

He, of course, denied this.

We then started to show him some of the evidence that we had.

But he still carried on denying that he was doing anything wrong.

I think what changed his mind is when we told him

-that social housing fraud is a criminal offence.

-Yeah.

While the tenant went away to consider his options,

the housing association's priority was to get the house

back into their possession.

With more than 400 people on the housing waiting list

in the Mole Valley area, the home was desperately needed.

And after the interview with investigators,

the tenant made a swift decision.

Within a couple of hours, he phoned us back and told us

-he had in fact moved in with her and gave up the tenancy.

-Wow.

-So a really good result for you.

-That's right.

It's even better news for one Mole Valley family who'd been

waiting for a social housing property.

Within a month of the neighbour's tip-off,

they were able to move off the council housing waiting list

and start enjoying life in this popular Surrey village.

It's a lovely place, and now someone who actually genuinely

needs it is renting that property.

I definitely think that subletting is something that should be

cracked down upon. It is taking advantage of a system.

The housing has been provided for the people who need it.

If they have somewhere else to live, they don't need it.

There was someone on my block who had a property

and had another property in hand and was renting out to various people

from Ireland, from all over, coming in,

you know, paying high rent for the flat.

But eventually they got caught.

People that, you know, exploit that system in that way, it's,

I guess, a shameful abuse of that system.

The government's Right to Buy scheme has been running since 1980.

Under the scheme, you have the right to apply to buy your council house

and, in some cases, housing association home

if you've been resident for three years or more.

In 2015, the available discounts were increased to

a maximum of £77,900 outside London

and £103,900 in London.

We're back in Greenwich, where today,

grandmother Jacqueline Willoughby will be

sentenced at Woolwich Crown Court for, first, subletting her

council flat and then fraudulently applying to buy it.

-What was the weekly rent on our property?

-The rent was £127 a week.

And what's she been charging at in later years?

Monthly it's £1,000, nearly £1,100.

Six years after she left her council flat without informing

the council, Mrs Willoughby made an application under

the government's Right to Buy scheme.

With a discount of £100,000,

the three-bedroom council flat would cost her just £65,000.

She then, in 2013, actually put in a Right to Buy application.

The Right to Buy application shows a specific question.

Is the property the tenant's only or principal home?

And as you can see, it's been ticked yes there.

The council asked for more information from Mrs Willoughby.

And when she didn't provide it, they cancelled the application.

But the following year, she tried again.

This time, the discount was calculated at £102,700,

putting the cost of buying her flat at £72,300.

The 2013 application, they didn't proceed with it.

They later made a declaration again to the council that they'd

been honest in their declarations

and made another actual application, completed another application form,

again answering that question in 2014,

that one was, saying that it was her main and only principal home.

But in Greenwich, the council investigates all

Right to Buy applications as a matter of course.

And council officers paid a visit to the flat to check

that she was still living there.

Instead of finding Mrs Willoughby

at what she said was her only address,

there was a couple living there.

When they went to the property, they found the subtenants there,

who were quite frank about the situation.

They were paying £1,100 to who they believed to be

the landlord of the property.

The flat was being rented for double the amount

being paid to the council.

What's more, the occupiers had no idea it was a council-owned flat.

The investigating team called Mrs Willoughby in for an interview.

We had to interview her,

and she answered "no comment" to all of the interview questions.

She gave a written statement to say that she'd just moved out

in the spring of 2014.

If her recent application for a Right to Buy had succeeded,

how much would she have got from us?

How much of a discount?

About £103,000, she would have received in discount.

With all their evidence in place,

Mrs Willoughby was charged with four counts of fraud -

one for subletting the flat,

and three in relation to the Right to Buy applications.

-So what has Mrs Willoughby been charged with?

-Four counts of fraud.

The first count being her not using it as her only and principal home

as well as the subletting, in breach of Section 3 of the Fraud Act.

Two, three and four all relate to the Right to Buy matters

because there were two applications and a further declaration made.

Has Mrs Willoughby pleaded to any of these offences?

In the previous court hearing, she pleaded guilty to all four.

Today, it's time for Karen

and Nigel to see the final result of the investigation.

They are going along to Woolwich Crown Court,

where Mrs Willoughby is appearing to be sentenced.

After hearing mitigation, the judge handed down his sentence.

Mrs Willoughby was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment,

suspended for two years,

and ordered to do 150 hours of community service.

And as Mrs Willoughby and the family leave court after the case,

both council officers hope the sentence will deter

others from trying to profit from social housing.

The result today is the lady got nine months' imprisonment,

suspended for two years.

So, basically, he took into account her age and other factors.

The message is quite clear to her. She was very upset. She was crying.

The family are upset.

You know, just don't sublet your properties.

She's now got to work 150 hours in the community, unpaid,

so at least she's giving something back.

She's now got to pay some of our legal costs, which is good.

I think they awarded £750.

We are now going to be pursuing her for our financial losses

of over £102,000,

as a result of her depriving us of our property that we could have

given to somebody who was actually in need of a property.

The Greenwich council flat at the centre of the fraud has now

been re-let to a new tenant.

You will get caught eventually.

I'm not saying today or tomorrow, but eventually you will get caught

and then everything will catch up.

The sort of punishments, I would think,

would be significant financial ones.

So I'd be reluctant to do prison because it simply costs money.

But I suppose, in the worst case,

prison is an acceptable outcome. But huge financial penalties.

I don't know what the current punishment is for misusing

the system, but for a start, I'd say not a lifetime ban,

but banning access from using that system

for a considerable amount of time.

Empty and abandoned homes can pose a real problem for councils

because it can be a time-consuming and costly process to recover them.

There's more than 65,000 social housing properties

currently unoccupied in England, Wales and Scotland.

In the busy market town of Bicester,

there's mystery surrounding one flat that used to be

lived in by a young mum and her child.

Tenancy fraud officers are desperate to get inside because it seems

the family have disappeared without trace.

The rent's not been paid since last year, and the mum

and her eight-year-old child haven't been seen or heard of for months.

Today, investigator Lee Mariconda is on his way to visit

the two-bedroom flat owned by Paradigm Housing Association.

He wants to know if they've abandoned the flat or

if there's another explanation.

I've done quite a few visits to this property at all

hours of the day - morning, afternoon, evening visits.

I've not been able to get access, so we're actually now going to go

and do a final visit, just to go and see whether or not there's

anybody there before we take any further action.

In the last two visits, I've left calling cards

and I've also left a letter asking the tenant to contact us.

And, unfortunately, I've had no response to anything I've left,

and nobody's been at home on any of the visits.

So it comes to the conclusion that they're either ignoring

me or there's nobody there.

The young mum's rent was being paid by the council

through housing benefits.

When the rent stopped being paid,

Lee stepped in to see what was going on.

Housing benefit was in payment.

Housing benefit suddenly stopped due to a change in their circumstances,

and since then, there's been no contact from that person.

There's been no correspondence to put housing benefit back in place,

to make any agreement to pay the rent arrears, not contacted Paradigm

at all to discuss their tenancy.

When a tenant abandons a home

and they don't inform the council or housing association,

investigators need to establish exactly what's happened.

From a personal point of view,

I grew up in social housing to about the age of 13.

I feel that social housing is there for a good reason,

for people in my situation,

when we couldn't afford to live in private rented or get a mortgage.

And that's why I feel passionately

why social housing has to be protected.

Lee needs to find out whether this flat has been abandoned,

but he's also concerned about the family.

His enquiries started with the neighbours.

I went and spoke to neighbours,

and all have confirmed that no-one lives there.

And we rely heavily on neighbours because they are the ones who

can see and hear things that we, social landlords, don't see.

With a child in the family, one way to check if they're still

in the county is to see if the boy is registered at any school.

So Lee's next mission is to get in touch with the education department.

One of the investigations that I carried out was

contacting the county council's education department to find out

whether or not the child was registered with

a school in the county.

Now, the county council came back to me and confirmed that the

child had been attending a school in the county up until a year ago

but no longer attends any schools in the area.

It just adds more weight to our suspicions that the property's

abandoned, and we can use that as evidence if we go to court.

It looks like the family might have left the area,

but Lee needs to make sure before

the housing association can take action.

So what I'm going to plan on doing when we get to the property

is just a door knock to see whether anybody answers the door,

have a look for the signs to see whether or not anything's changed

since my last visit.

Anything that would just indicate that there's been some

kind of a movement in the property.

And he's not taking any chances.

Last time he went to the flat, Lee took some extra precautions to

make sure he'd know if anyone was coming or going.

On the last visit, I left some sellotape on the lock.

Now, it sounds bizarre, but if you put sellotape over the lock,

someone's going to have to use that lock to get in.

And if the sellotape is still there,

then clearly that lock hasn't been used.

I also put the recycling bin on the mat in front of the door,

so if any one's been there, then, you know it will be moved.

As Lee arrives, he spots the first telltale signs that nothing's

changed since his last visit.

The bin's still where he left it four months ago.

The recycling box that I left in the middle of the front door is

still there. It's not been moved from the last visit I made.

As you can see, the sellotape that I put on the door is still

intact, there, over the lock here,

and also on the Chubb lock at the bottom.

If it's still intact, it shows me

that no-one's made any attempt to enter this property.

I am 100% sure that the property's abandoned, and this

sellotape's been on the lock now since...

for the last four months now.

There's nothing wrong with giving up a housing association flat,

but tenants are obliged to let the landlord know so

the property can be given to someone who needs it.

Now Lee can start the process to get the property back.

I mean, eviction's a big deal.

I mean, it's not something that we take lightly.

That's why we have to carry out all the investigations

that we can in order to get the property back.

You have to be satisfied that the property is

abandoned before you take eviction process.

This process could have been avoided if the person that was living here

had done the simple thing by just giving us back the keys.

We could have got this property back a lot quicker.

I'm going to go back to the office now and process the court papers.

Coming up, as the bailiffs move in, the housing association officers

are shocked by what's behind the door of the abandoned flat.

-I must admit, I didn't expect this.

-No.

-I have to be honest. Shock.

I feel if someone abandons council property, that's really unfortunate.

It's a real waste, you know,

of accommodation for people who need it. I think if that's

as significant in materials as you possibly suggest, I think

policies and procedures and processes

should be put in place to try and identify those properties.

And then make sure that those properties

are put to the appropriate use.

Well, if someone's leaving the property,

and actually just leaving it to rot, essentially, again that's just

taking a very, very valuable resource

from the marketplace, essentially.

They've got it, but then they leave it, do you know what I mean?

They've got it and it's a privilege.

It ain't a right, it's a privilege to have it.

Families throughout the UK are desperate for social housing.

But waiting lists are longest in the capital.

In Tower Hamlets, in London's East End,

there are nearly 20,000 households waiting for a social housing home.

Almost 3,000 have been waiting for more than ten years.

And six of those households have been on the waiting list

since the 1980s.

Investigating and tracking down housing fraudsters puts

a strain on the public purse.

When councils are forced to go to court to get a property back,

the costs can soar.

It can cost local authorities up to £12,000 to evict someone.

The tenant of one social housing flat in this tower block

moved out and went to live in Ghana, letting her family use the flat.

But even when investigators caught up with her,

she and her son still refused to give back the keys,

forcing the council to go to court and get her evicted.

Fraud investigator Avril Drummond was called when a man was

seen taking belongings out of the ground floor flat.

The housing officer e-mailed me to advise that on a visit to the area,

she had noticed that there was a gentleman clearing out the property.

The tenant should have been an elderly lady in her 60s,

but the gentleman who was there, he said he was the son of the tenant.

When tenants leave their social homes or there's any change in who's

living there, they're obliged to let the council know.

But in this case, there had been no communication and the housing

officer wanted to know why the man appeared to be clearing the flat.

He gave them his details, but the rent was still being paid,

so we started having a little bit of concern that it might be

being sublet or about to be sublet.

When he was pressed for more details,

the tenant's son wasn't very forthcoming with information.

He said he was the tenant's son.

He said that she'd been in Ghana for a couple of months.

She hadn't been gone for long and he was just changing the carpet.

With the tenant supposedly away in Ghana, Avril's first task

was to find out what was in

Poplar HARCA Housing Association's records about her.

First steps were to look back through the tenancy,

see who was registered at the property,

who the lawful tenant was, who else had been living with the tenant.

The records showed that the woman tenant had

moved into the flat in 1994.

The only other tenant registered at the address was her brother,

but he'd already moved out.

There was another gentleman that was registered as living there.

He was the brother of the tenant, but we had rehoused him as he had

claimed that he was overcrowded living there with his sister.

So we decided to go and visit the property then.

Avril and the team did their best,

but whenever they visited, no-one was at home.

Within a couple of weeks,

I made several attempts to visit the property -

early morning, during the day, later on in the afternoon.

I left calling cards.

Nobody contacted me to say, "Right, well, I'm living here."

There was no communication whatsoever.

The people best-placed to know what's happening

at a property are usually the neighbours.

And that was the team's next step.

I spoke to the neighbour who said they hadn't seen

the lawful tenant for years. You know, a long time.

And there was another male that seemed to come and go,

but they didn't believe there was anyone actually living there.

It looked like the tenant could have moved out without telling

the council and left the flat for the convenience of her family.

I started running checks on the tenant

and anyone else who'd been living at the property.

The tenant hadn't been registered there on the electoral roll

since 2010, so that was five years.

She'd only had one bank account listed at the property,

and that had also ceased any activities from 2012.

So, for three years,

there didn't look like there'd been

any activity from the lawful tenant.

Avril wasn't going to leave the

property empty for any longer than necessary.

She informed the tenant that the flat was going to be taken

back by the housing association.

Well, the next steps for me was to serve notices on the property.

I tried contacting the alleged son by the phone number that he

had given the housing officer.

Avril asked him to come into their offices for an interview. He agreed.

The son said he came and went, but

now he had moved into the property.

He couldn't tell me, though, how long his mother had not been there.

He believed it was a couple of months, and I told him

it was clear she had not been there for years.

He was also surprised.

He didn't know his uncle had been living there either.

So it was clear to me that he

hadn't known the full circumstances of his tenancy.

I advised him that we were serving notices on the property

and the reason why.

Avril also wanted to know how long the lawful tenant had been

away in Ghana and why.

He did say his mother had not been well, and I asked him

to bring in some kind of like proof that she'd been taken ill abroad.

The son couldn't provide any proof, so official notices were

sent to the flat as well as to the woman's address in Ghana,

informing her that the flat was

being reclaimed by the housing association.

Then Avril heard from the tenant.

I received a letter from the tenant in Ghana saying that she was

away and could her son look after her affairs while she was there.

I did write back to her to advise that we had served notices and

I enclosed the notices and asked her to seek independent legal advice.

I told her we couldn't allow her son to remain in the property.

He had no legal claim to the property.

Avril asked the tenant to return the flat to the housing association

herself so there'd be no need to take legal action.

-But she didn't do it.

-The file was then sent through to our solicitors.

We applied to court for possession hearing,

and we had the initial hearing in January of this year, 2016, and the

judge granted us outright possession forthwith of that property.

The son would have seen the order for possession.

I did contact him as well.

He said he needed a little bit more time to vacate the property.

I gave him an extra week and a half.

The keys weren't returned to us.

The family seem in no hurry to give up the flat

they're now unlawfully occupying.

It's particularly frustrating for Avril,

as the property is on the ground floor so could be being

used by someone from the housing list

who has difficulty getting around.

Avril has since visited the flat a number of times to try

and get the keys back.

This property is a one-bedroom flat.

Currently in our borough, we have over 8,500 households

on the waiting list requiring a one-bedroom house.

The court gave us possession of this property a few weeks ago,

so I have had to instruct our solicitors to

request a bailiff's warrant from the court, which is going to

be more time-consuming and more costly.

So we're just going to have to wait and see now

whether he hands the keys back as promised or

whether the court date comes through and we have to wait for the

bailiff's warrant, which is something

I was trying to avoid if I could.

The bailiff's warrant could take six to eight weeks to be

processed by the court.

But within three months,

this flat should be ready to house

one more tenant from the waiting list.

If they've found somewhere else they live

and they can afford to pay rent, then they should vacate

their own house and give it to somebody

who hasn't got anywhere to live.

If it's a house that, you know, you're getting from the state,

and you have enough money to move abroad, it's just not fair.

There's an amount of people who are living here right now that need

the help like now.

It's so important that people get housing that's safe and healthy

when they need it rather than just like waiting...

Earlier, housing investigators visited a family flat that

seemed to have been abandoned by a mum and her eight-year-old child.

Lee Mariconda has done all he can to track down the tenant.

The county council confirmed that the child had been attending

a school in the county up until a year ago,

but no longer attends any schools in the area.

It just adds more weight to our suspicions that the

property's abandoned.

After his last visit, Lee went to court to get permission to

evict the tenant and repossess the property.

Today's the day the bailiff's go in to take back the abandoned flat.

A locksmith will be on hand because housing associations

and councils don't hold keys for their properties.

It's frustrating for us because it's a property that we

know is sitting there empty, and it has been sitting there

empty for a while and that we should never have got to this stage.

But this is the last resort. This is the only way that

we're going to be getting the property back.

And here we are.

I've come here to meet my colleague Lauren, who is from the rent team,

and a locksmith.

We're actually going to be carrying out the eviction,

and we're sort of going to be meeting the bailiffs here as well.

-Hi, Lee. How are you?

-Yeah, good, thank you.

-Good.

-Bailiff's here yet?

No, I've spoken to the bailiff. He is on his way.

-But the locksmith is here.

-Shall we go and talk to him?

-Yes, let's go.

-Have you had any contact from her at all?

-Nothing at all.

-Me neither.

-No.

-Hiya, it's Lee. How are you?

-Fine, thanks.

-What about yourself?

-Not bad.

-Hi, I'm Lauren.

We've met before, haven't we? Yeah.

The bailiff has arrived.

It's his job to hand the property back to the landlord,

and he's usually employed by the county court.

He will escort anyone inside off the premises,

but he can't use force.

It's up to the housing officers to fill him in on the background.

The more he knows,

the better, as he'll be the first one through the door of the flat.

-Is it the upstairs flat?

-It's the flat, this one here.

That's the top flat in the corner.

-Has anybody knocked?

-We believe the property's empty.

Basically, we've had no contact from her for several months now.

-So the neighbours haven't said anything?

-Have the neighbours...?

The neighbours have not seen her.

I put sellotape over the lock in October.

The sellotape's still on the lock.

And also we've done some background checks as well with agencies,

and they've all confirmed that she's not here.

The tenant was notified of a date and time for the eviction.

That time has arrived.

It's one o'clock now, so the eviction can go ahead.

HE KNOCKS

-Right. Might as well go in then.

-OK.

The locksmith is getting to work.

Once everyone's in, he'll change the locks.

It's been a long journey to get to this point

and there's some tension in the air.

Everyone's keen to see what's on the other side of the door.

There can be various complications

because somebody could have barricaded the door inside.

Eventually we always get in.

My role is to just turn up and be the first into the property,

and then to make sure that there's nobody left in the property.

And if there is somebody there,

I give them the opportunity to collect the essential things

they're going to need and I escort them off the property.

We have got no idea what's behind the other side of the door.

It could be anything.

-And we're in.

-Anybody in?

Do you want to come in?

The housing officers were expecting an empty flat,

but they're shocked to see it's still full of belongings.

-I must admit, I didn't expect this.

-No.

-You don't know what... yeah.

I was expecting nothing to be in here, to be perfectly honest.

Generally, when a property is abandoned,

they would normally just leave.

They'll take their personal belongings and stuff like that.

That's generally what happens. But this, this is not what I expected.

This is just like they've just gone out

for the day or something, you know?

I'm speechless actually. Absolutely speechless.

It's as if the family have walked out of their life,

leaving absolutely everything behind.

It's just like they've just popped out for the day, you know,

and they're just going to come home of an evening,

because literally there is everything here.

You know, there's belongings, there's furniture,

there's clothing, there's paperwork.

There's all kids' stuff here as well.

It's very rare that you'd go somewhere and not take anything.

And there's an extra bed in there, which suggests that there's been

-more people living in the property than we were aware of.

-Yeah.

This is unusual because it does look as

if they've left with the intention of coming back,

and clearly they haven't.

Looking around the flat, it's obvious this family left in a hurry.

In the bedroom, Lee and Lauren find letters that give them

more clues about when the mum and her child disappeared.

-The letters that are out are dated 2014.

-The stuff that we can see,

I mean, stuff going back to early 2014, so it would indicate

that was roughly around the time that the person was last here.

Yes, there is something here from September 2014.

I've only been trying to get hold of them

since about August time.

It's very bizarre that there's letters here from 2014.

It kind of suggests that the property has been abandoned

a lot earlier than what we thought.

Yeah, shock.

-I have to be honest.

-The rent was covered by housing benefit

through the local council, and it was that that stopped,

and then the rent arrears started building.

We had no contact from the tenant, which obviously made us

take further action and start investigating it further.

Lee's getting worried.

He's beginning to think there might

be more to this story than meets the eye.

One concern that we might have now is that we might have to make

some enquiries with the police, see whether or not there is any

reason to be concerned. I mean, things like this.

We've got a box of shells and stuff.

To us, it might not seem anything, but that's a sentimental thing.

Why has that not been taken with them?

Things like kid's glasses, for example.

Again, you know, the child is going to need their glasses.

You've got a calendar here from January 2014, so that's the last,

that's when it was last on there. So, again,

that could indicate that's when they were last here.

So we're talking two years now.

This is really concerning as well.

There appears to be an outfit ready to go.

It's clear the housing investigators' work isn't done yet.

They'll have to make every effort to find out where the family's gone.

And even though the belongings have been left behind,

they can't just be destroyed.

By law, the owners must be given 30 days to collect

any of their possessions.

We'll have to make every effort that we can to try and get

a forwarding address for them.

The police will only give a certain information,

so we'd have to obviously ask for information

under a welfare concern, and we can certainly do that.

The last enquiries I made that the child had left

school in the county in 2014,

so where they've gone after that, it seems to be a bit of a mystery.

While they try to track down the family,

an inventory will be made of

everything that's been left in the flat.

If no-one makes a claim on the items within a month,

they'll be destroyed.

It does hold things up a little bit more.

Unfortunately, it's protocol and that's what we have to do.

The locksmith's done his job

and the housing investigators have done all they can for the moment.

Lee's leaving with mixed feelings.

But while he tries to solve the mystery of the family's

disappearance, at least one more household will soon be able

to leave temporary housing and get a home of their own.

It's not what we expected today. I mean, it's a bit of a shock.

But there is a positive out of that

in the fact that we've now got a property back

and we'll be giving it to a family pretty soon.

I'm intrigued, more than anything, as to what's gone on there,

because something clearly's not right and I'm going to try

and find out what's gone on.

But in the meantime, we're going to obviously do our bit to get

the property cleared and get it back into possession for somebody else.

After we filmed, investigators did manage to

track down the family, who were found safe and sound in Birmingham.

Within three weeks of the eviction date, the flat's new tenant

moved in, a man who'd been sleeping rough on the streets for two years.

It's down to the determination, dedication

and detective work of housing investigators that

so many social housing properties are being reclaimed

and given to families that really need them.