Why Chelsea Barracks could be just the job for Blears and her parliamentary pals
Former communities secretary Hazel Blears and seemingly just about every cabinet colleague has been or is in the process of being hounded out of office for alleged expenses abuse.
But property folk should be a bit more charitable. She was merely complying with the prime minister’s aim of using taxpayers’ money to help prop up the housing industry. Well, at least her housing industry.
According to the BBC, she claimed for three properties in a single year, switching the second home declaration from her Salford home to her south London flat, then sold it for a £45,000 profit before buying another in the capital for £300,000.
For tax purposes, she classified the first London flat as her main residence and thus didn’t pay capital gains tax. She argued that this complied with both Commons and tax rules. Strictly, yes. But she subsequently agreed to pay £13,332 to the taxman.
So assiduously does the diminutive redhead seem to have churned her property portfolio that she might be better remembered as Flipper rather than her current moniker, Squirrel Nutkin.
Of course, she’s not alone. The Palace of Westminster seems to be filled with a whole bunch of greedy flippers.
Just about every supposed scam to be dredged out daily by the Telegraph involves housing: second houses that became main homes for tax purposes; mortgages claimed on houses without mortgages; moats round houses; bath plugs for houses; floating duck houses…
There’s a neat symbolism here. Britain’s housing boom turned millions into speculators and spivs. MPs simply became representative as well as representatives of the people.
With everyone right up to the top on the make, is it any surprise that there was little or no regulation of the clearly unsustainable mortgage lending binge when alarm bells should have been resounding four or five years ago?
There’s great symmetry as well. The list of shame appears to be evenly balanced between Labour and Tory. No doubt, the verdict of the electorate will be “a plague on both your houses”. Or, in Blears’ case, all three.
It seems certain that MPs will lose the right to profit from housing inflation on homes funded by the taxpayer. But how will members from outside London be housed? Gordon Brown, as a son of the manse, could have the solution: give each one the equivalent of a vicarage, to be handed on after retirement or defeat. Just like Number 10. But parliament would become a glorified letting agency maintaining hundreds of dispersed properties.
Instead, why not just cram them all into a hall of residence? There could be a perfect site for them half a mile from Westminster: Chelsea Barracks. The scheme faces being kicked into the long grass, possibly for years, as its Qatari backers bow to Prince Charles’s pleas to change the architecture. But this could just be an excuse for the developers to mothball a scheme that won’t sell.
The government could offer to take the thing off their hands for half the original development appraisal. Cut costs by dropping Lord Rogers and doing a design-and-build job. Get sufficient cosmetic input from a “name” architect to buy off the prince and CABE. Not so cutting edge, not so pretty. But MPs don’t deserve any better.
Alastair Stewart is building analyst at Investec Securities
Alastair Stewart
