About  1000 Lambeth owned properties are being left vacant, resulting in £3.5m lost rental income every year.

“I am shocked by this level of mismanagement,” says Conservative Parliamentary Candidate, Kemi Adegoke. “The £3.5m in lost rent is just the tip of the iceberg in Labour’s failed management of our housing, locally and nationally. This could be spent on reduced rent and service charges. Local residents are punished for Labour’s  incompetence.”

These properties could have been redeveloped, or sold for hundreds of millions of pounds, to create homes for the 14,000 people on the housing waiting list.

Letting properties become derelict makes streets ugly and increases antisocial behaviour. The council will not invest in developing these properties and refuses to sell them off swiftly, just leaving them there to rot.

“The Audit Commission has rightly fingered Lambeth Council and Lambeth Living,” says Kemi, “but the real problem lies with a Labour government obsessed with new and shiny things. Their high taxes on refurbishment have made it cheaper to build new than fix derelict properties and they restrict funding to new buildings.”

Click one of the images below for slideshow of some of the empty properties, several of them having 4 bedrooms.

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