Vicky Williams, Cllr John Woolf and Stephanie Toghill

THE Town Hall says it is clawing back thousands of pounds in taxpayer money as they use tip-offs, CCTV trawls and court orders to recover homes from the hundreds of ­people fraudulently profiting off their social housing properties in the midst of London’s worst housing crisis.

Investigators at Islington Council this week told the Tribune how there could be up to a thousand council homes in the borough being used as short-term lets on sites like Airbnb.

The fraud team have recovered 84 properties this year, but say this is just the tip of the ice-berg, and that they have found shocking ­examples of council tenants raking in tens of thousands of pounds through short-term lets while living abroad.

In one judgment, handed down just last month, a man was found to have been illegally sub-letting his dead parents’ council home near Old Street while living in Poland.

The judge described Scott Crampton’s behaviour as “so devious” and said it was clear he had lied repeatedly when he tried to contest that he had not listed the property in Rahere House on Airbnb.

When his parents died in 2020, Mr Crampton filed an application claiming that he had a right through “succession” to their flat.

But not everything was as it seemed when his application made its way into the hands of the Town Hall’s housing fraud team, which analyses every one of its kind.

“We check every succession application because it’s a high-risk area,” explained Stephanie Toghill, who heads up the investigation team. “A third of properties we recover are fraudulent successions. People claim to have been living in the property when they haven’t been, I’ve had people provide false documentation. It’s one of the easiest routes into social housing and if you are then sub-letting you can make huge amounts of money.”

The average monthly rent in Islington is £2,700, but the average for a council flat is £600.

“That’s a £2,000 profit you can make from subletting a home,” added Ms Toghill. “That’s a wage.”

In Mr Crampton’s case, the investigators contacted neighbours, trawled through bank statements, and tracked down flight records, before contacting the Home Office to confirm that in fact he had not been living in the UK at all.

Their findings showed that the man actually lived in Poland, but was simultaneously claiming housing benefit at a second address in Islington and carer’s allowance at a third. None of this stood up.

The decision was made to bring Mr Crampton to court in order to get the home back, but as they awaited the trial, investigators continued looking at the case and things took an even more bizarre and brazen turn.

An advert for a sub-let council home

Trawling through CCTV, the team could see people entering and leaving the Rahere House flat with suitcases, and when they later knocked on the door, it was answered by a person who said they had rented the flat on Airbnb for the cost of £2,000 a week.

“The investigating officer came back to the office and immediately started going through Airbnb to find the property and locate it,” said Vicky Williams, who also works in the fraud team.

The rental property platform is the largest of its kind, but the team consistently finds itself embroiled in battles for the website to release data and information.

Under the current system, Airbnb will not voluntarily hand over information and instead has to be mandated by a court order.

Only two of these orders – which essentially say that the third party has been “mixed-up” in the fraud – have ever been executed against Airbnb. The second was in Mr Crampton’s case.

“They [Airbnb] won’t adhere to your average information request, which is very frustrating,” Ms Toghill told the Tribune.

“It delays the court process and it costs us. They could very easily carry out their own checks to make sure that the person who is letting out the property actually owns that property. They could use Land Registry records. What would it cost them? 50p?”

The chief investigation officer said that some estimates put the number of social homes being illegally used as short-term holiday lets in Islington around the one thousand mark.

“It’s definitely on the rise, because it’s an easy way to make money,” Ms Toghill added.

Housing chief Councillor John Woolf said that the property rental platform should “absolutely” be held accountable for its role in the fraudulent letting of council homes.

“It’s their responsibility to be transparent and co-operative with local authorities,” he said.

In the meantime, the team are reliant on tip-offs from neighbours, council staff, and even councillors and canvassers going about their door-knocking in the run-up to the local elections, where they can cross-reference names on the electoral register with who is actually living in the home.

Each property recovered saves the taxpayer £66,000.

“It’s a financial cost, but it’s also a real ethical issue. We have 16,500 people on the waiting list, 1,900 people in temporary accommodation”, said Cllr Woolf.

“If people are being fraudulent and playing the system whilst we have people languishing on the register, that’s just not on and our residents want us to be robust on that.”

He added: “Every case that goes to the courts, to me it beggars belief. This is intentional, this is mendacious, it’s fraud.”

A spokesperson for Airbnb said: “There are no listings at this address on Airbnb. Hosting in social housing is usually illegal and has no place on Airbnb.

“We have a clear process for local authorities to alert us to social housing fraud, and we remove these listings promptly upon notification.

“We have worked with the Public Sector Fraud Authority and Islington Council directly on an initiative to further help local authorities identify and remove illegally let social housing properties and plan to scale this across the UK this year, including all London boroughs this year.

“We are currently working with Islington Council to expedite these plans.”