Freida Alves’ commute across London to clean at Chelsea football club’s stadium only takes an hour – but it might as well be a million miles away in terms of wealth, comfort and simple human decency.
For years Alves has swept up after the fans at Stamford Bridge in Fulham. Her other duties, at the club’s state-of-the-art training base in Cobham, Surrey, have included laundering the players’ kits and cleaning the office of José Mourinho, the coach formerly in charge of a squad paid in excess of £1m a week by its billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich.
Alves’ home, by contrast, is shocking in its squalor. She and her husband live in a single room in an illegal rooming house in Canning Town, east London, operated by a convicted rogue landlord. Their bed crawls with lice, a broken outside door lets in cold air constantly, there is no running water and just a filthy hot plate for cooking.
They are not alone. Around a dozen low-paid workers live in this illegally converted solicitor’s office, paying £300 to £400 a month per room. The landlord and the company which owns the building have already been fined close to £30,000 for breaking housing regulations including over-occupancy, multiple fire safety breaches, mould and corrosion. But conditions which are unfit for human habitation persist.
They are among more than 120,000 people in England and Wales estimated to be living in illegal houses of multiple occupation. More and more people are squeezing in together as high rents leave the poorest little choice but to rent shared properties. Exploitative landlords have also realised that local councils lack the resources or powers to stop them. Almost a third of houses of multiple occupation are now estimated by the government to be unlicensed - some 23,000 properties.
Half of councils in England have served zero or just one enforcement notice under the Housing Act in the last year, according to information released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The property on the Barking Road operated by a Ugandan bar owner, Lawrence Ssendege, is just one. There are no shared kitchen facilities and only one shared toilet and shower for the nine rooms in the complex, residents say. Frieda, a proud woman, refuses to use the filthy bathroom and instead goes across the road to the McDonald’s restaurant to wash and use the toilet. She is in a state of despair and holds her head in her hands almost constantly.
“I cleaned for Mourinho, I put the players’ uniforms into washing machines and I was living here,” the cleaner told the Guardian, during an enforcement visit with officers from the London Borough of Newham and the London fire brigade. “I felt sad about that.”
Her husband sifts rubbish by hand at a local recycling depot. He queues for 12-hour night shifts most evenings but there is not always work and he often returns to the room, unpaid.
When Alves lifts the bed covers, black bugs scuttle across the sheets. The door to the fire escape is held shut with a piece of string and won’t close properly, so cold air flows in. A small electric heater fails to keep the cold at bay. Her room is filled with pots and pans and bags of rice, which she cooks on the filthy two ring hob.
Residents come and go at all hours. Another resident said he has been there for a year and pays £300 to share with a room which has a small bathroom attached. He said that at one point, 20 people lived in the rooms.
The illegal housing is accessed via a shabby door between a carpet shop and Ssendege’s restaurant, King’s Continental Cuisine. It was unlocked when the Guardian visited. A dark corridor leads to the shared ground floor bathroom which features a single toilet and a dirty shower. Worn stairs lead to the upper office floors which are subdivided into small rooms, sometimes with rough plasterboard partitions. Water leaks through the roof when it rains, soaking two storeys below, residents said.
“People shouldn’t have to live like this,” said one. “I work hard to keep the roof over my head and I come home and it is like this. It is frustrating. I tried to find somewhere else but I can only afford £300. I would need to pay a £3,000 deposit and that is impossible.”
A single room in a modern two-bedroom flat in the same area rents for over £860 a month. There are 25,000 households currently on the local authority’s housing waiting list.
Other residents include a Portuguese recycling worker who shares a cramped room with another man and pays £300 a month. A warehouse worker from the Czech Republic said that last winter he lived for two and a half months with no electric light or heating in his room, which had been subdivided from his neighbour with roughly fixed plasterboard. He has a microwave but said: “I don’t cook, just takeaways.” Another resident works for Ssendege, 47, in his bar, kitchen and elsewhere in the building. Ssendege described him as a “porter” and said he pays him £100 to £150 a week.
Last year Ssendege was fined £15,600 because of a lack of fire doors, holes in windows, electric hobs stationed in corridors, mould and corrosion. He was served with an enforcement notice by the London fire brigade for 10 failures including lack of fire alarm, lack of escape routes in the event of a blaze and inadequate measures to stop fire spreading between floors. He has since installed a fire alarm, but the fire brigade has said the building remains dangerous.
The company that owns the building’s freehold is run by Kiritkumar Thakrar, a 63-year old British chartered surveyor from Edgware from whom Ssendege leases it. Thakrar’s company, Pambridge Properties Limited, was convicted two months ago of overcrowding and breaching fire safety conditions at this property and was fined £13,000. The company is registered to a car repair workshop in north London, which the current manager said Thakrar sold several years ago. Thakrar did not respond to a request for comment delivered to his semi-detached home in Edgware. The ownership of the building is ultimately held by a company in the secretive tax haven of Panama.
Ssendege told the Guardian he wants to improve the property’s condition so it can be properly licensed but blamed the residents for the current condition. “The place used to be nice, but they don’t clean, they don’t do nothing,” he said. “They mess up the place completely. The doors don’t close because they damage them.”
He claimed the residents do not pay rent because he wants them to leave so he can carry out works. This was denied by three of the residents the Guardian spoke to who said they did pay. He also said there was a shared kitchen in the building. When asked to show it to the Guardian he declined, citing the residents’ right to privacy. Two residents said there was no shared kitchen.
Newham said it is running an “ongoing inquiry into the conditions inside the property and possible failures to license an HMO”.
Frieda Alves is not her real name.
