Council forced to give squatters a list of all its empty properties
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:45 PM on 20th March 2009
A council has been forced to give details of every empty home in its area to squatters because of a legal loophole.
Lambeth in South London had to hand over the list after squatters submitted a Freedom Of Information (FOI) request.
The Labour-run borough provided details of an estimated 800 properties despite council officers' fears that the move could lead to a marked rise in squatting in the borough.
Embarrassing record: Lambeth council flats at Limerick Court which were occupied by squatters until a mass eviction last year
Critics will ask whether the coup could be used as a precedent by other squatters' groups.
They accuse the local authority of 'incompetence' in the way it handled the request from the Advisory Service for Squatters, submitted in September last year.
Liberal Democrat opposition leader Ashley Lumsden said a senior council source told him that housing officers had earlier committed 'a grave error' by publishing a list of all vacant properties in the appendix of a council document.
When the squatters presented their demand, the information was already in the public domain so the request could not be denied.
But the council said it had been forced to give out the information because of a legal precedent set by another council.
Officers outside part of the St Agnes' Place squat during a raid in 2007 that netted a large haul of drugs
A spokeswoman for Lambeth Living, which manages the borough's council housing, said: 'When responding to FOI requests we have to operate within the letter of the law.
'A legal precedent had already been set in response to a similar FOI inquiry to Bexley Council.
'On challenging the request, they were instructed by the Information Tribunal that they had a legal duty to provide the address details of empty properties which were not owned by individuals.'
She added that the number of Lambeth properties with squatters had fallen over the past six months from 49 to 45.
The incident is not the first major embarrassment for Lambeth in its struggle with squatters.
Police move in to evict squatters from St Agnes' Place in Lambeth in 2005
Four empty blocks of flats at Limerick Court on the border of Streatham and Balham were occupied by more than a hundred people for six months until they were evicted last summer.
Two years ago at least 100 armed police officers used stun grenades in a huge raids on a property in Kennington which had been used as a squat for decades - finding several kilos of cannabis, crack cocaine and six rounds of live ammunition.
Councillor Lumsden said the Freedom of Information incident was in a long line of blunders by the housing department that has seen it overspend by an estimated £23 million, and the number of empty council homes double since 2006 to close to 900.
He told the Streatham Guardian: 'The administration seems hell-bent on destroying public housing in Lambeth through a mixture of brain-numbing incompetence and sheer bloody-mindedness.'
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