Behind the Old Vic theatre and away from the traffic of the busy Waterloo Road in central London, a little piece of Nepal is thriving. In a mobile home in the car park of an empty office building, Ishor Kumar Gurung and Dilip Limbu, two former Queen’s Gurkha Engineers, are making the Nepali national dish dahl baht.
A quick tour around their rather spartan living quarters at the rear of Partnership House, SE1, reveals two camp beds, a rice cooker, washing machine, TV and various cuttings from Nepali newspapers – all maintained with military precision.
But instead of military fatigues, the pair are sporting polo shirts branded with the name Vigilance Properties. They are here as live-in security guards, preventing squatters and other trespassers from getting in to a high-risk empty office property.
When asked whether intruders are a problem for the Gurkhas, Limbu shakes his head vigorously. “We see them around the perimeter,” he says, mildly. “But they don’t come in.”
This is a great improvement on a year ago, when the building, a disused Church Missionary Society headquarters, left vacant since 2006, was broken into by vagrants and used as a venue for illegal raves and drug dealing.
It was after the body of a homeless man was discovered in the building in January 2009 that security firm Vigilance was brought in. Set up in the recession, the small firm’s USP is that it employs former soldiers as resident caretakers to secure empty properties.
“Gurkhas often desperately want to come to England after they complete their time in the army but many of them struggle to get a job because they don’t speak much English. Often it’s only casual work as perhaps a kitchen porter which can be quite sporadic,” says Vigilance director Seb MacKenzie-Wilson.
“By employing them as caretakers they usually don’t earn enough to work with us long term. But it gives them a stepping stone to other things and references.”
This means that, unlike security guards who are assigned formal duties, Dilip and Ishor are simply required to live in Partnership House as a deterrent to squatters. The rule is that one of them must remain on site at all times (both at night) freeing them up to attend job interviews and visit friends and family.
“Dilip is leaving us soon to take on a full-time security role and we encourage that,” says McKenzie-Wilson. “We’ve got dozens of other guys on standby on our books ready to go.”
The company is the brainchild of Chris Hartley, a former captain in the Grenadier Guards, who left the army two years ago after a stint in Afghanistan to find that the credit crunch had put paid to many of the jobs in banking and finance that were traditionally the province of former officers.
Using his connections from both the army and university, Hartley set up Vigilance with co-director McKenzie-Wilson, a former journalist and university friend, in the hope of finding a way into the already flourishing residential caretaking market. Rivals such as Ambika Security work on a similar model but without the military connection, while Camelot Property Management charges caretakers to live in the properties they occupy.
Vigilance currently provides around 40 caretakers at vacant properties mostly located in London and the South East. Requirements vary depending on the sites but most are taken on as self-employed security contractors and generally earn around £40 a day.
Vigilance has found plenty of work in the thousands of stalled development schemes across the country.
“The property market moves very slowly, especially at the moment, when lots of development has been put off so sites are sitting empty,” says Nico Marshall-Lee, a co-director at Vigilance and a chartered surveyor who was made redundant from King Sturge last year. “We are often only called in when there’s a problem, which means the property has already been damaged and there’s a great deal more work for the client,” he adds.
Set-up costs at a site are low, usually between £1,000 and £1,500 to cover items such as beds, bedding, cutlery and a fridge for the caretakers. After that, a typical Vigilance service will cost a landlord around £2,400 a month. This can be much cheaper than conventional security firms, which, it says, can charge more than £8,000 a month for a property guarded 24 hours a day. Vigilance’s clients include quoted developers, LPA receivers, local councils, the NHS and private individuals.
Hammerson retail asset manager Jonathan Brooks is impressed by the service, which the company has used at two London schemes, in Brent Cross and Kingston, for the past two years.
“In the army, people spend a lot of time being told what to do,” says Brooks. “In our experience, that means that Vigilance provides a professional service which is competitively priced. They do what they say they are going to do and let us know if there are any problems with the property.”
Vigilance sees itself as a social enterprise as well as a commercial one because it is also giving ex-soldiers a way forward in civvy street, whereas without help from such an organisation they could be left homeless and vulnerable.
“Guys go into the army at a very young age, often before they are fully responsible, and the army does everything for them. It gives them three square meals a day. So when they come out they have to learn how to do things like manage money,” explains MacKenzie-Wilson.
“It’s difficult to find a job when you have no permanent address and hard to find a place to live when you have no job. We see this as a way to help guys to manage. It’s something which gets them back into society, especially if they are living on the streets. It’s a chance to get some clear thinking space to decide what they want in the long term.”
To do this, Vigilance works with military charities such as the Army Benevolent Fund, the Gurkha Welfare Trust and a number of homeless charities. It has employed a total of 55 ex-servicemen over its first two years of operation and has another 30 signed up.
But finding suitable applicants through these charities is only the beginning of a stringent process.
“We don’t just take guys off the street,” says McKenzie- Wilson. “We take them via these charitable organisations who rehabilitate rough sleepers. They are each assigned a care worker who assesses them. But even then we have a long and stringent interview process.”
A case in point is Darren Nelson, a former infantry soldier in the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment, who is one of two former soldiers guarding another of Vigilance’s properties.
Nelson displays great pride in his new home as he shows us around his quarters, a former builders merchants in Camden, N1, where the men are camping in what used to be an open-plan office.
Pots and pans are carefully stacked in the kitchen and in a corner a pair of dumb-bells are stored neatly.
Nelson spent six years in the British army, including tours of duty in Iraq and Northern Ireland, where he had a position of responsibility managing army stores.
“Unfortunately, I got into trouble with alcohol and ended up homeless,” says Nelson. “I ended up in an army hostel for the homeless in Catterick and got my head sorted out there.
“I was helping the newer guys there until my case officer put me up for this. Working for Vigilance is good because I want to become a personal trainer and this job gives me the time and space to train for that.”
Why Vigilance is needed
Protecting empty properties across the UK has become more and more of an issue for landlords as the economic downturn continues to bite and development projects are put on hold.
Independent campaigning charity Empty Homes Agency says that there were 651,993 empty homes in England in 2009, while, according to the Council for Mortgage Lenders, 9,800 UK homes were repossessed in the first three months of 2010.
Figures for empty commercial properties are harder to come by, but most estimates suggest vacant commercial properties significantly outnumber vacant homes.
And the problem is getting worse as the financial crisis puts more and more occupiers out of business.
According to the Valuation Office Agency, up to 8,900 buildings were demolished between March 2007 and the end of 2009. This is thought to be mainly the result of businesses choosing not to pay business rates on empty commercial buildings. And in April, NB Real Estate also found that the amount of commercial property in the UK had shrunk for the first time since records began from 6.20bn sq ft in 2007 to 6.19bn sq ft in the year to January 2009 as landlords demolished some of their vacant buildings. Last month, the Local Data Company reported that shop vacancy levels in the UK stood at around 12.6%.
Official statistics on homelessness and squatting are not compiled but in 2008, homeless charity Crisis estimated that at any one time in Great Britain there are 700 rough sleepers, 43,000 in hostels, night shelters and refuges and 10,000 squatters. And, according to another homeless charity Shelter and the government’s Social Exclusion Unit, one in four homeless people is a former member of the Armed Forces.
