Episode 4 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...

County court bailiffs!

..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 discover an ex-pop star forging documents

in a tenancy fraud spanning nearly 20 years.

The occupant has been arrested,

he's about to be brought down and taken off to a police station.

We find out just how intense cracking down on suspected

cheats can get.

Yeah. Where did you...?

I would like to have a look around the flat.

And we catch up with a tenant who claims he's living

in his council house in Reading, when he's actually in Greece.

You wouldn't put your status as, "Living in Greece,"

unless you were living in Greece.

-That's pretty blatant, isn't it?

-Yeah, absolutely.

England is home to eight million social housing properties.

A staggering 20% of these tenancies are thought to be fraudulent.

Meanwhile, there are 1.8 million families on the waiting list.

From technology to tip-offs,

housing investigators have many weapons with which to tackle tenancy

fraud, but sometimes the most effective is a surprise door knock.

Our first case is an unlawful sublet.

The couple who should be living here have been subletting for nine years

to their nephew, whilst they've been in Portugal.

6am, Battersea, South London, the Springfield estate.

Ben Marshall and Alan Emmerson are housing investigators

from Lambeth Council.

They've received a tip-off that two of the properties

on the estate may be being unlawfully sublet.

So, they're heading out before dawn to see if they

can catch people at home.

Morning. Lambeth Council.

No light on.

No, but I think that is his BMW downstairs.

Ben's informer also mentioned the car.

Good morning. From the council.

Good morning, sir.

I'm doing a tenancy audit, I'm after Maria or Jose.

Who are you, please?

The man who comes to the door is not the legal tenant.

But he agrees to talk to the two investigators.

Ben and Alan are invited inside.

OK, thank you. Cheers.

But our cameras are not allowed in.

The legal tenants of the property are a middle-aged couple

originally from Portugal.

The person who answers the door is a young man in his 20s.

He tells the investigators he's the nephew of the tenants

and he's paying the rent.

But he also reveals that he has someone else there paying HIM rent.

I'll write to you and we'll take it from there. OK? Cheers, mate.

So, it seems the official tenants have been gone for a full

nine years without ever telling the council.

Nine years in which someone on the housing waiting list could

have been in the home.

We've been into the property, the tenants went abroad nine

years ago and that's what the guys told us as well.

He knew the game was up.

He was pretty much saying, "Yeah, I know there was a situation,

"I knew something like this would happen at some point and,

"yeah, it's true, it's fair enough.

"My uncle's been gone for, I think, nine years, pretty much."

Pretty safe to say we'll get the property back,

How many families, over those nine years,

could've been housed in that pretty nice flat?

It's pretty wrong.

Three weeks later, Luke goes to see Ben, to see

if there's been any developments on this case.

So, Ben, tell me what evidence you have on this one.

Well, we looked into the guy that was in the property.

The tenants are long gone, they've been gone for nine years,

but he's the legitimate nephew of them

and, so, they've left him to use the property. No-one's told us.

Right, so, basically, the original tenant has left, gone elsewhere

and effectively handed over or given the property to their nephew?

Absolutely.

And he's a younger guy, so I did a bit of looking into him

-and I found out that he's a managing director of his own company.

-Really?

What kind of company? Have you got anything you could show me?

Yeah, well, this is a support services company

and one of the things that they do is they do, for example,

cleaning of pre-tenancies and around the housing market

and cleaning of communal areas and bits and pieces.

You know, loosely based in, certainly, social housing.

The other thing is, so, he's paying the much reduced, you know,

rent of sort of £450 a month or so.

When obviously, if he was in the private sector,

it would be 1,300 at least, I would have thought.

But the thing that makes it even worse, actually,

is that it's a two-bed property.

He was in one of the rooms,

but he was subletting the other bedroom throughout as well.

-Oh, wow.

-Throughout these nine years as well, so...

I don't know how much money he's made from that,

but it'll be very significant.

We know a bit about the nephew, who's been living in the property.

Where are the original tenants, do you know?

Well, they are Portuguese and the long and short of it is that,

nine years ago, they went back to Portugal to live in Portugal.

They've got their own home in Portugal

and that's simply where they are.

They decided then to give the property, effectively,

to their nephew here, cos he was still in London.

They don't have the right to do that, do they?

Absolutely not, no. They simply needed to tell the council

that they were leaving, we'd have got the council property back

nine years ago, we'd have turned it round very quickly

and, as I say, some homeless family wouldn't be homeless.

We're in a very wealthy country.

Nobody in this country should be living without a roof

over their head.

I think the social housing system is very valuable

and it's clearly under tremendous pressure

and we've seen a lot of examples of that recently.

And, yeah, I think it's central to the future of London

that we have a healthy social housing sector.

I'm an ex-council tenant, I'm now a home owner.

But it was a really good thing to be able to get into,

for the simple fact, like you said, it was a stepping stone.

I couldn't afford to go and privately rent,

I couldn't afford to buy anything,

but I was lucky enough to get a council flat.

So, I used it as a stepping stone and, obviously,

I'm now a homeowner.

I still live with my parents.

Cos I can't afford to move out,

but I'm grateful and thankful that I have a roof over my head.

In 2013, the Prevention Of Social Housing Fraud Act

came into force, making the unauthorised subletting of council

properties by the official tenant a criminal offence.

People who are unknowingly renting from the official tenant

would not normally be prosecuted,

but if the subtenant

does know and is in on it,

they could be charged

under the Fraud Act.

The next case is an extraordinary story of an ex-pop star

who assumed someone's identity

in order to stay in a council property

that he wasn't entitled to.

The lead investigator on this story is Mike Frost.

In the last six years, he's reclaimed 519 social housing

homes from people who were misusing them.

Today, Luke joins him as he hopes to make it 520.

Mike's been uncovering one of the most extraordinary cases

he's ever come across.

They're on their way to Stockwell, in South London,

to raid on a council property which has been unlawfully sublet

for nearly 20 years.

We're investigating a case that the fraud's gone back

roughly 20 years.

Wow, I mean, 20 years is, obviously, a massive amount of time.

# Beautiful Sunday... #

The person who's been renting it is an ex-pop star.

# My beautiful day... #

This is him on a German TV show in 1972.

His stage name was Daniel Boone.

But his real name is Peter Green.

# My, my, it's a beautiful day. #

The story starts in 1995 when a man called Frank Zourab

moved into a lovely Victorian council property in Albert Square.

Not that one, this one's in Lambeth.

But two years ago, when a housing officer made a routine visit

to the property and was refused access, alarm bells started ringing.

Mike began an investigation.

He quickly discovered that the man paying the utility bills

was a Peter Green.

So, where was the official tenant - Frank Zourab?

Mike's team went back to the address to find out exactly who was

living in their property.

The man who answered the door said he was Frank Zourab.

He actually opened the door for us straightaway.

He was very amenable.

But he was quite adamant that he was Frank Zourab.

To prove it, he showed Mike a Freedom bus pass

with a photo ID in the name of Frank Zourab.

But Mike wasn't convinced he was actually the legal tenant,

so he asked him some more questions.

We asked him what his date of birth was

and he gave us the wrong date of birth for our tenant.

I didn't believe that he was Frank Zourab from that moment.

So, the investigations team dug deeper.

They checked with the police and with the border agencies

and discovered Frank Zourab had left the country in 1996.

The man who was actually residing at the flat was ex-pop star

Peter Green.

He was about to face some tough questions.

I said to him, well, we're going to do an audit,

he has to sign and confirm details and also we'd take

a statement from him and if he lied in that statement,

that would be considered fraud

and that's when he held his hands up.

He had used his photo with Frank Zourab's name

on official documents that he used as ID in order to

live in a property he wasn't entitled to.

Now, Mike's about to join police officers

and a bailiff at the property.

He's obviously used the property, misused it for 20 years

in our tenant's name.

-That's a massive amount of time, isn't it?

-It's huge, yeah.

Mike's priority today is to make sure that any evidence at the flat

is collected and preserved

and that Peter Green is arrested and taken in for questioning.

KNOCK ON DOOR

-Hello, Peter.

-Come in, I'll put on me dressing gown.

The police explain to Peter Green the reason for his arrest.

-OFFICER:

-Sir, it's Brixton police.

Over the last couple of years or more than a couple of years,

you've had in your possession false identity documents

with improper intention of using them,

i.e. someone else's identity with your face on certain documents,

official documents.

For that reason, you're going to be arrested today

-and taken to Brixton Police Station, OK?

-Oh.

The man who Mike believes has been pretending

to be the official tenant for 20 years

has been told to get dressed, while Mike and the police

search the house for evidence.

So, Mike, what's happening at the moment?

Basically, we're just going to have to do a search of the property

to gather some of the evidence that we've seen previously.

-He has said to us that he's thrown a lot of it away already.

-OK.

He admitted to doing that.

But I know that some of the documents used to be in his room,

so once the policemen have finished dealing with him there,

we'll search his room after we've searched the rest of the property.

OK, what kind of things are you looking for?

Just looking for the false IDs,

looking for any potential tenancy agreement.

Any links where I can see an association between himself

and our tenant.

He knows our tenant, he's known him, apparently as friends,

he communicates with him and sends him Christmas cards.

He has their telephone numbers and their addresses,

so, we'll be looking for an address book as well

with telephone numbers as well.

-There could be a lot of information you could find here.

-Yeah.

It seems there's more paperwork in the bedroom.

And just to clarify, the gentleman here

that's just been arrested has been, effectively,

pretending to be the original tenant for how long now?

Er...over 20 years.

-Right. Massive amount of time.

-Yeah, it's huge. It's huge.

A council tax bill only strengthens the case against him.

The name of the real tenant is Frank Zourab

and this council tax bill is in the name of Peter Green,

which is where he's changed it.

Chopped and changed it from Peter Green to Zourab and back.

OK. When he thought he'd been rumbled, as it were,

-he changed it back into the tenant's name.

-To the tenant's name.

-That's correct, yeah.

-OK.

With Mike's investigations complete,

it won't be long before the property is repossessed.

The occupant has been arrested

and I believe he's about to be brought down

and taken off to a police station.

Mike and his team are going to stay upstairs to try and find

some more evidence.

After 19 years of living there, there's a lot of paperwork up there.

So, Mike, what happens next?

From here we go to the police station,

where we'll conduct a PACE interview.

Gives him an opportunity to put his side of the story in,

obviously, hopefully clear the matter up for us.

Hopefully we'll garner some details of our tenant,

make contact with our tenant,

cos that's the next most important step.

We'll contact our tenant and hopefully get this property

back into circulation.

The police questioned Peter Green

and the housing association got the property back.

The flat has now been re-let to someone

from the housing waiting list.

I think it is good if councils do investigate

and, as I said, I think the deeper problem

needs to be addressed as well.

But, certainly, in the short term, yes, I'm in favour of councils

making sure that what limited supply there is

is going to people who need it the most.

I think it's just such a shame that, if there is a system there,

for it to be abused.

I think we've probably got to look at the reasons why

people are doing that and also how it's allowed to happen.

Because, obviously, all of those people who are kind of abusing

the system have more than their fair share,

there's people who have absolutely nothing.

I mean, it's been so cold recently

and the number of people who are homeless on the streets

is just heartbreaking.

It's not fair, is it? Other people could have that flat.

But it's happening a lot, actually, yeah.

There are other ways tenants

can illegally use their council properties.

A 31-year-old Birmingham man conned home seekers

out of £2,000 worth of deposits

when he advertised his council flat using a classified ad site online.

The same man had previously been sentenced

to two years in prison for defrauding women

he met on dating websites.

His council flat advert tricked a single mother of two

and a trainee chef out of several hundred pounds each.

He was sentenced to two years

and eight months in jail.

Investigators Ben Marshall and Alan Emmerson

from Lambeth Council

are making unannounced visits to the Springfield housing estate

in South London.

Working on information received, they're following up on

properties they think might be unlawfully sublet.

They've received a tip-off from the police that the people

living at this next flat are not the official tenants.

-Hello.

-Hello, good morning. From the council.

-Good morning.

-Morning.

-Morning,

-BLEEP.

My name's Mr Marshall, from the council, my colleague.

We're doing a tenancy audit of the property, of the block.

I should also say we're being followed by the BBC at the moment,

so, they're filming at the moment.

Is at all right for us all to come in?

All right, we've got two ladies as well.

Thank you.

The lawful tenants of this flat are a middle-aged couple.

How long have you been living here?

-So, you don't live here?

-No.

-Where do you live then?

-At

-BLEEP,

-97

-BLEEP.

Southwark, is it?

You're here now.

But you don't live here, OK.

My information is that you do live here.

So that's one thing I would say.

-Who's your uncle?

-BLEEP.

The man is claiming that he's looking after the flat

for his uncle.

Did you sleep here last night?

Right, OK.

Yeah.

-So, where is

-BLEEP

-now?

Apart from you, who else stays here?

OK, if you don't stay here, who does stay here?

Anyone else?

And they live here, do they?

-No, that's fine.

-If you don't know, you can just tell us you don't know.

We're just trying to establish who might be at the property.

We've come here this morning looking for the tenant.

-Yeah.

-Where did you stay last night?

Yeah, well, I can...speak to him.

I would like to have a look round the flat.

The man refuses to answer any more questions and he tells Ben and Alan

he wants them to leave,

so that he can get back to sleep.

No worries.

Ben and Alan are heading back to the office

to dig deeper into exactly

who's been using this property and for how long.

Two months later, an enquiry's still ongoing.

A series of credit checks have been carried out

revealing that eight different people

have been financially associated with the property in recent years.

Ben and Alan believe the lawful tenant is no longer living there

and are preparing to start the formal process

to get the property back.

Subletting is obviously wrong and should be cracked down hard.

I think people who illegally sublet their council accommodation

should know that they're breaking the law,

whether morally or criminally.

I think they deserve to be punished as criminals

and in my view they should lose their property

and pay back all the money they've made.

Well, I suppose they're subletting it to people

that still need housing,

so, that is I suppose right,

but they shouldn't use it for their own income.

The people doing the illegal subletting

are doing it fraudulently, they won't pay tax.

So, that tax isn't going into providing more housing,

so everybody is a loser from what's happening.

Ah, Greece.

Sunshine, blue skies, picture-postcard scenery.

It's no wonder so many of us Brits visit every year.

One council tenant liked it so much, he decided to move here.

Nothing wrong with that until you know he's supposed to be living

in a social housing property near Reading.

The tenant concerned is a martial arts teacher.

He'd been a tenant of housing association One Housing

since the late 1980s.

There was nothing remarkable about the tenancy

until a few years ago when housing officers noticed that

whenever anything needed doing around the house,

it was always the tenant's daughter who contacted them.

Luke finds out more.

Our tenant's daughter had called on behalf of her father

a couple of times with repairs.

If you've got someone's daughter just phoning up,

that's quite normal, is it?

Just to organise repairs or whatever is needed?

It's not unusual, but it happened on a number of occasions,

they hadn't really seen him, they'd gone round to the property,

they weren't finding the tenant.

They weren't really seeing him at home.

So, suspicions at the housing association were raised

and then the tenant called Reading local authority's

council tax department.

In April of 2014, our tenant called them up and said,

"I want to move, I'm moving abroad with my wife.

"Can you put our daughter on the council tax?"

At this point, he's only talking to local authority,

but what he's saying there is he's going to go

and live abroad somewhere else,

his daughter's going to stay in the property.

-If you have social housing, you can't just do that, can you?

-No.

I think he didn't expect anyone to be looking at this too seriously.

Maybe he didn't think he was doing anything that wrong

by just allowing his daughter to live in the property.

It's a common misconception,

but normally you cannot pass your social housing on to your children.

They have to join the queue with everyone else.

Back on the trail, the council contacted the housing

association investigators and asked them to look into the case.

They began their search online.

We make great use of social media, things of that nature.

-People post about their lives.

-Yeah, sure.

So, what we did, we did a quick search

and we found a profile for our tenant online.

OK, what did that tell you?

March 2014, saying goodbye to the pets,

cos he's moving to Greece.

-"Due to our house move, our beautiful pets

-BLEEP

-and cat

-BLEEP

"and the dog are changing household.

"It's sad to see them both going."

He's re-homing his pets and, again, you can see March 2014

right around the time...

It's tied in with the information we already have

that he's going to leave.

You can see here that it says he's living in Greece

and a picture of the house there.

From our point of view,

the evidence doesn't get too much better than that.

I guess you wouldn't put your status as, I can see it there,

"Living in Greece," unless you were living in Greece.

This is a social media site, Facebook,

that everyone uses, pretty much.

-So, he's putting that out there to the world.

-Yeah, absolutely.

And he's very detailed about what he posts and there's a lot of it,

so you know, and it's very specific about locations, what he's doing.

He tags himself in, so, you can see from some of the posts,

we'll have a look, that he's actually located himself

as being in Greece when he's putting that up and putting that out there.

He's putting so much information on.

So, in a way he's giving you, on a plate,

quite a beautiful life story in images, isn't he?

Absolutely. Anyone who can use a computer can access.

-It's very blatant, isn't it?

-It is, yeah.

With nearly 39 million people in the UK using the internet

every single day, tracking someone's life is easier

than you might think.

From social media and online banking to chatrooms and forums.

It's a source of information

that councils

and housing associations are now

actively using to investigate

tenancy fraud suspects

and put guilty parties behind bars.

More evidence came in the form of another status update.

So, you can see here in the very same month on this next post,

"Started a new job."

OK, I mean, that is just, surely, all the information you need?

The guy has moved, I can see it says, "Moved,"

I can see it says, "Started work."

Yeah, absolutely, I mean, for us,

this is almost the perfect investigation.

We don't really want to have to go and trace money or anything

through three, four, five bank accounts.

This is all here, it's all been given to us

by the tenant simply putting information out there

for the public and for anyone to read.

With so much evidence already in the public domain,

Graham felt confident his tenant would move his daughter out

and give the keys back to the housing association.

We've had an interview with him

and we've essentially put this information to him.

We've said that we don't believe that he's living at the address,

that his daughter's living at the address and he's out in Greece.

We've taken him through the same evidence that we've shown you today.

He denied that he was living in Greece.

-Really?

-Absolutely.

-Wow.

What he said to us was that, essentially, you can update

your Facebook status from anywhere and I just do that.

I want all my friends to know that I've...a nice life,

I've got self-confidence issues...

So, basically, he was saying to us,

"I'm not living there, I'm just making these posts up."

So, Graham was forced to get yet more evidence.

We also requested bank statements from him

and one of those was a joint account with his wife in Greece.

We asked him in the interview if he had,

if he knew about that account and at first, he denied it.

He denied it flat out.

We said to him, "We've got this joint account,

"that's going to clearly show transactions coming from Greece."

Did he try and fight to keep the property?

A few days later, he came to the office and said

that actually he didn't want to have that fight...

He said that he was prepared to hand the keys back.

Finally, this Greek tragedy had come to an end.

We have vacant possession, we have the property back

and it's in the process of being re-let.

OK. And I have no doubt whatsoever that a family

who is in genuine need of social housing

will be over the moon to live in a house like that.

Yeah. Absolutely.

We've seen before, it's a lovely property,

it's going to one of the many deserving people

who will make good use of it.

London councils own a quarter of all council homes in England,

but are responsible for over half of all housing fraud detected.

1,618 homes were recovered

from cheats in London last year.

If you've got something that's worth a lot of money,

i.e. somewhere to live in London,

it's bound to be open to, you know, people abusing the system.

I think the strain in London is particularly difficult.

London is a hub for migrants,

it's a hub for people who want to work on the black market.

And I think...and therefore, as a result of that,

you're going to get overcrowding.

There are people out there that do need social housing

and need it desperately.

Especially people with bigger families.

So, in order for other people to actually earn their money

off that, which I think is quite...

It's not nice, really, is it?

Who wants to sleep on the streets?

Who wants to, you know, not have a bed?

Who wants to sleep in hostels?

As far as I'm concerned, my home is really important to myself.

And, you know, if it came that I basically no longer needed it,

the first thing I would do is give it back to the people

that I actually owned the place from, you know,

and not be selfish about it.

Some tenancy fraud cases can be resolved very quickly,

but others can take months of painstaking detective work.

Viridian Housing is one of the biggest housing associations

in the UK, it manages over 16,000 properties.

Preventing property fraud is a big priority for them.

Luke meets up with Katrina Robinson,

who heads up Viridian's tenancy fraud operations.

Katrina is relentless in her pursuit of tenancy cheats,

so much so her efforts were recognised by Her Majesty

when she received an MBE in the New Year's Honours list.

Katrina, how do you deal with housing fraud here at Viridian?

Well, we have two in-house tenancy fraud investigators

and we also have an in-house legal team.

And we are very passionate about detecting

and stopping tenancy fraud.

Why are you so passionate about this?

Because it's simply not right

when we have the huge problems we have at the moment

and probably will continue in the country regarding housing.

But people are making vast sums of money

out of subletting our properties and they just shouldn't be.

Our properties are to house people that have a social housing need.

We're not here for people to make a profit out of us.

It is pure greed.

People can make an awful lot of money out of it,

but, of course, now they can also go to prison because of it.

Do you think a lot of people think,

"Got a social housing property or a council property, it's mine,

"it's just the council, I can do exactly what I want with it."

Yes, unfortunately, I feel a lot of people are of that view.

They consider it's like, you know, back in the 1970s is when

you got a social home, you had it forever

and you never got evicted and things are very, very different now.

Our next case took Katrina's team over 12 months to unravel.

And it involved a young woman who not only barely set foot

inside the property allocated to her,

but tried to cling onto it by falsifying documents.

This is Redcliffe Square, in the Earls Court area of London.

Once known as bedsit land, it's now an exclusive

and sought-after area.

Luke's on his way there now,

with housing officer Debbie who wishes to remain anonymous.

In March 2014,

Viridian Housing moved a young woman into a flat in Redcliffe Square.

A starter tenancy was given to a female single occupier

about March 2014.

She was nominated to us, because she was in a female hostel.

On the face of it, the tenant seemed like a deserving case,

but after a few months,

the neighbours reported that there was no-one living at the flat.

Debbie decided to investigate further.

You've given someone a tenancy who's in a vulnerable situation,

who's been living in a hostel and they appear not to be there.

-Well, that's what was being alleged...

-Right.

..after the first, sort of,

when the referral initially came to me.

I conduct background checks.

She wasn't showing as laying a footprint.

When you say footprint, you mean things like gas, electricity,

utilities, that kind of thing?

Yeah, yeah, sort of, like, showing, maybe bank statements,

maybe you'd move your mobile phone contracts.

Am I right in thinking that we are kind of seconds away from Chelsea?

I mean, this area is the London Borough

-of Kensington and Chelsea, yes.

-Incredible.

It's just full of incredibly tall, beautiful houses.

-SHE LAUGHS

-Yeah, yeah.

You can park here, we're going to the property

that's literally just over there to the other side of that square.

OK, so it's actually on the square?

-It is on the square.

-This is stunning, isn't it?

Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's a very impressive entrance, isn't it?

Yeah, really nice.

Let's go inside and have a look.

So, how many flats would be in here?

There's eight.

One of the first clues that the tenant

wasn't actually living at the property

came when her mail started piling up.

Obviously the tenant's mail is put on the hall table here

and it had been reported that there was uncollected mail for the tenant.

OK.

Which I saw for myself when I visited, there was a bundle.

OK, are you going to show me the flat?

-Yeah.

-Great.

Let's have a look.

What's sort of the layout here?

-This is the bathroom.

-OK.

-That's nice. Nice, high ceilings.

-Yeah.

And then the living room next door.

All right.

-I mean, it's a studio flat.

-It's a studio flat, yeah.

-So, it's living room and...

-Bedroom.

-..bedroom.

But it's still a good size and I can't get over the location.

-Well, for a single person, yeah, exactly.

-Perfect.

Where it is for the amount of money - great.

A typical studio flat on the open market in Redcliffe Square

would fetch up to £1,500 a month.

The housing association rent on this property is just £514 a month.

-Up here, so it's on two levels. This is the kitchen.

-Yeah.

-It's pretty sizeable, isn't it?

-Well, yes.

She had the flat, what happened in terms of her...?

I spoke with my manager, who sort of given the lack of contact,

we had people in the block saying they'd not been seen.

The housing officer had made visits, she'd not responded,

there was piles of post being left in the hallway.

-We decided to serve the notices.

-OK.

Serving a notice to quit and a notice of seeking possession

means the tenant has a set period of time to vacate the property.

If they failed to do so, then eviction proceedings will start.

So, when you say serve notices, that's giving the tenant,

your tenant the opportunity to give the flat back,

-because it's clear they're not using it.

-Yeah.

How did she react to that?

Well, I served the notice which has two months before it expires

and I literally heard from her about four days before it expired.

-Really?

-So, for almost two months I heard nothing

and then she picks the phone up.

What did she say?

She said that she had been away

and had to deal with a family emergency

and that this was her main home and that she would prove it to us.

I gave her the opportunity to go away and provide me

with utility bills, payments made, usage details from the date

that she moved in the flat to the date that she made contact.

So, the tenant came up with some e-mails that seemed to

indicate the services were all in hand.

I looked at the sort of e-mails that were being sent

and I queried them with the actual companies themselves directly.

-The e-mails had been doctored that she'd been sending to me.

-Really?

The tenant faked e-mails from the utilities company

to try and keep hold of the flat that she wasn't even living in.

After she'd rang me in response to the notices and that I said,

"This is what I want," she then got on the phone to all the utilities.

-Kind of...

-Saying I need the account in my name, kind of thing.

It's kind of quite desperate.

Yeah, I sort of said to her, basically,

"I'm fully aware of, you know, what you've done,

"you've doctored e-mails to make it look like you've been resident

"from the start date and been paying bills."

When you confronted her with that, was she shocked?

Well, this was over the phone.

And she was in denial, complete denial.

Surely the whole idea about social housing

-is that you actually live in it?

-And you live there. Yeah.

It has to be your main and principal home.

In fact, leaving the flat empty is a breach of the tenancy agreement

and it's preventing someone in need from living in it.

After a whole year of battling it out at court,

eventually the housing association won back possession of the flat

and the tenant was ordered to leave.

-This is now clearly a home to someone.

-Yeah.

So, you got the property back and it's being re-let to someone else?

Yeah, within weeks of getting the property back,

the new tenants moved in, made it their home.

That must give you amazing job satisfaction

to know that someone in genuine need now lives where we're standing.

Well, all I can say is congratulations with your tenacity.

-Great work, well done.

-Thank you.

You don't just walk through the door and say,

"Can I have a property, please?" And they're handing out keys.

To be issued that and then not use it,

I can't understand why people would do that.

The victims of social housing for me would be the people

that genuinely have a need for immediate social housing

so people that maybe need to have...be moved from a hostel

or maybe from a bedsit to somewhere that's more permanent

if they're a young family.

And they're not having that availability,

cos someone else is exploiting the system.

It's so valuable, this housing, that we should be very disciplined

about how it's used and councils should be very careful

about what they do.

I think that far too many social housing homes

were sold off in the past, which has left a desperate shortage now

and I know people who are on waiting lists,

so I do think it's a problem, yes.

This next story came to light

when a housing benefit claim was made from an address

which should have been rented out to another family entirely.

In fact, the family who should've been living at the flat

in Poplar, East London, had moved out

and were unlawfully subletting it.

This is Avril Drummond, from Poplar Harca housing association.

She's passionate about social housing going to the right people,

in other words, the people who've been waiting patiently

on the housing list, rather than wanting to jump the queue.

She first got wind of this case when a colleague examined

a housing benefit claim from a resident

in one of Poplar Harca's homes.

This case first came to light...

I received an e-mail from the rent officer

to advise me that a housing benefit claim had been made

by somebody who wasn't our lawful tenant.

So, I started looking into the circumstances,

I carried out financial checks on the person named

on the housing benefit application form and also on our lawful tenant.

And I found that our lawful tenant,

although she was still registered on the property, the electoral roll,

so was another three different people which concerned me greatly,

as it was only a two-bedroom flat, it's not a huge property.

So, I started carrying out financial checks

on the lawful tenant and that showed

that she did have a few financial links to the property,

but so did the person who was named on the housing benefit form.

Normally, you wouldn't register your bank account or credit cards

or apply for credit at a property you don't live at

as your main and principal home.

So, Avril dug further into the tenant's paperwork.

I checked back on the tenancy, there was no notification that this

tenant had other people living in the property with her.

And she was still registered there with her husband and two children.

So, the property would have been extremely overcrowded

with eight people living in a two-bedroom flat.

If you're a social housing tenant,

you're supposed to inform the council if you get married

or have children

or if there's any change

in the number of people

living in your property.

Once Avril was sure of her case,

she went to the flat and spoke to one of the people living there.

It turned out to be a friend of the tenant.

Once we were inside the property, the tenant's friend,

who'd been living there for years,

she was very helpful, very cooperative.

She gave us some, you know, more information, more evidence.

The documents the subtenant gave to Avril

showed she was paying £350 a month in rent to the official tenant.

With other names also associated with the property,

Avril decided she had sufficient evidence to start the formal process

of getting the flat back.

And allocating it to someone else.

We believe that the property was being, possibly,

misused for up to four years.

Putting everything together, the financial evidence,

the evidence, the witness statement from the tenant's friend,

her bank statements, also the pictures of inside the property.

That, in whole, gave us, we believe, enough evidence

to warrant serving notices on the property, which is what we then did.

Once Avril had told the official tenant how much evidence she had,

the tenant didn't take up the option to go to court,

but handed the keys back.

The property has been reallocated to a local family in genuine need

off the waiting list, which is absolutely fantastic.

You know, every single family that's re-homed, you know,

is a job well done, as far as I'm concerned.

So, absolutely over the moon

that a deserving family has now been re-housed.

It really is down to the hard work and tenacity of housing fraud

officers that tenancy cheats are being stopped in their tracks.

And those properties can then be given to people in genuine need.