Extensive Damage

Andrew Kersley writes:

The newly-elected Labour MP Bayo Alaba has been outspoken on the question of housing. Last year, when he was still serving as a councillor in Redbridge, he wrote an impassioned “call to action” for the website Progressive Britain about “The Imperative of Stable Housing for Stronger Communities”. 

Alaba said he shuddered at the thought of how his life would have turned out if his mum and five siblings had been forced to navigate the private rental sector “back in the day”. In the now-deleted blog, he wrote: “The one thing that kept me moderately ‘anchored’ was a stable home, consistent friends and a familiar community that didn’t change every 18 months.”

Since being elected as the MP for Southend East and Rochford in Labour’s July landslide, Alaba has maintained his interest in the need for secure housing. Recently, he visited one of the largest homeless charities in his new constituency, tweeting that “Nobody should have to spend the night on the streets.”

And yet, it’s hard to square these sentiments with a conversation we had with a woman at her front door in East London last month. A mother of two young children, she said she was terrified of being left on the street because she was being evicted from her flat. Who was behind the eviction? The flat’s owner, Labour MP Bayo Alaba.

“I don’t even know what's going to happen to me,” she told The Londoner, with one of her children nearby. Technically, the woman had already been homeless for several years, and the flat had been provided to her by Redbridge Council, meaning that the same council in which Alaba served as a councillor was paying him rent for so-called ‘temporary accommodation’.

“They [the council] could move me to Birmingham, they could give me a one bedroom flat,” the tenant told us. “It’s stressful.”

Since we made our visit, the mother has been evicted – she was made to leave the flat on October 21st, just one week before Alaba posted his tweet about how “Nobody should have to spend the night on the streets.” We don’t know what has happened to her afterwards, and haven’t been given any information on her current status by the council or Alaba.

But the story raises awkward questions for an MP whose party has campaigned on ending unjust evictions and improving tenant’s rights — policies that Alaba says he supports. Not to mention the potential conflict of interest of another local councillor being paid rental income by his own council.

The eviction

The tenant, who we will refer to by the pseudonym of Anne as she asked not to be named, was first told she was being evicted in November last year because her landlord wanted to sell the property. She had no idea the landlord in question was a Labour MP. Despite the longer notice period, Anne was not able to find other accommodation as she awaited her inevitable eviction because the council would not be able to find her alternative homeless accommodation until after it had gone through.

Normally Alaba’s justification for the eviction (selling the property) would fall under the umbrella of a Section 21 ‘no fault’ eviction, a practice Labour is set to ban, with the changes expected to come into force next year. But her rolling “temporary accommodation” tenancy has less protections than a normal tenancy and allows private landlords to evict tenants by just choosing to end their contract with the council rather than having to file a Section 21 notice to the tenant.

So far, Redbridge Council has not been able to answer our question about whether a Section 21 notice was used. “Ordinarily for an eviction, a section 21 is required,” a spokesperson told us this morning. If a Section 21 was not required, as Alaba says, then that is only because he was evicting a homeless tenant who was staying in council-provided “temporary accommodation”.

Alaba told The Londoner the tenant had “done extensive damage to the flat” and that he served them notice because he “was considering renovating and selling” the property. He added that he ensured there was a “very long notice period”, that he was “as flexible and fair as possible” with the move and that “legal process was followed at every stage”.

Alaba’s properties The Londoner first decided to look into the new MP after we discovered he was the fourth biggest landlord in parliament. Top of the list was Jas Athwal, whose role as the landlord of an unsafe children’s home was the basis of our recent investigation. That story was subsequently reported by The Times, The Sun and Private Eye, and led prime minister Keir Starmer to say Athwal needed to take his “responsibilities” seriously.

Coincidentally, Alaba was also a councillor in Redbridge, the council Athwal led for a decade and the two men seem to know each other well. In August 2022, Alaba tweeted: “I cannot think of anybody more deserving and suited to being Ilford South's (my former home) next MP, than Jas Athwal.”

Most of Alaba’s seven rental properties are in Redbridge, with two in neighbouring Barking and Dagenham. Some are managed by Alaba himself while at least three in Redbridge are managed by an agent. Our investigation was complicated by the fact that almost all of Alaba’s homes do not appear on Redbridge’s register of local landlords, and their addresses have been removed from copies of Alaba’s council register of interests. Even freedom of information requests we put to the council came back with the addresses redacted.

The Londoner was only able to determine the locations of his properties in Redbridge by manually searching dozens of Land Registry filings for properties on two streets whose residents associations Alaba had declared a connection to.

When asked about this, Alaba provided evidence the homes were all licensed but the council did not explain why they did not appear on their databases. Alaba claimed the addresses were removed from his register of interests because he did not want one of his rental properties to be mistakenly publicised as his own address after he was subject to racism and threats during the election, a decision supported by the council.

Most of the properties are a short walk from one another, in the middle of a near-silent labyrinth of ageing red brick apartment buildings in the southern tip of the borough. It was during a visit to one of those properties that we met his then soon-to-be-evicted tenant. Another tenant we spoke to suggested their home was also council-provided homeless accommodation.

When asked by The Londoner, Alaba did not confirm how many of his three externally managed properties were used as temporary accommodation, and the council only confirmed that one of the homes had been used by them to house the homeless. Redbridge council has said it spent an “unsustainable” £52m on temporary accommodation last year. Just under 3,000 households in the borough live in temporary accommodation, according to government data that covers January-March 2024. / That suggests that the council spends roughly £17,000 a year on average per temporary accommodation household (Alaba did not confirm his exact income from his temporary accommodation properties in question other than to say it was the “market rate”).

‘Never any conflict of interest’

It also means that his rental income for those homes was ultimately derived from the same council he served on as a councillor, and where he and his fellow councillors would shape local homelessness and housing policy.

Alaba said that “there was never any conflict of interest” with his role as councillor by renting out temporary accommodation to the council as he had followed all the rules on declaring interests, and wasn’t required or asked to declare the tenancy type of properties. This was echoed by the council, which stressed councillors weren’t involved in direct “decision-making regarding how we place people into temporary accommodation”.

But the situation would make Alaba the second Redbridge councillor turned MP – after Jas Athwal – to have received Redbridge Council rental income for their properties. “It’s outrageous for a councillor to take council money to house homeless families, only to evict them,” a spokesperson for the London Renters Union told The Londoner. “Bayo Alaba must resign.”

The spokesperson went on: “A lack of social housing lets landlords exploit the homelessness crisis for personal gain. For any MP to be part of this exploitation is a disgrace. How can renters trust the government to tackle the housing crisis when its own MPs exploit renters?” They also called for the government to investigate Redbridge Council’s handling of this case and the Athwal case.

“I have always prided myself on being a good landlord. I maintain properties to a high standard, respond quickly, and follow legal and due process at every point,” Alaba told The Londoner in a statement, adding he “waived rent” when some tenants fell into arrears during Covid.

He confirmed that he was “fully in support of the government’s Renter’s Rights Act” and the abolition of Section 21 evictions, saying that he was “a strong supporter of tenants' rights” and believes his conduct as a landlord “reflects this”.

Know more about this story — or the wider issue of councillors renting their properties to their own councils? Please get in touch.