It was nice to see one of my local papers West End Extra sub-headline, that LABOUR’s SUCCESS is QURESHI’s LOSS after 12 years in office at City Hall as an Assembly Member (AM) but the real explanation is the D’Hondt formula. 

As the 11 London-wide Assembly Members are elected using a form of ‘proportional representation’. Votes from across London for the London-wide Assembly Members were added together. The 11 seats were then allocated based upon a mathematical formula – the Modified d’Hondt Formula. This took into account the total votes cast in the London-wide ballot together with the number of Constituency London Assembly Member seats that each political party had already won.

11 rounds of calculations took place to fill the 11 vacant Assembly Member seats, with the party or independent candidate with the highest result at each round allocated the seat. Seats won by parties were allocated to party candidates in the order they appeared on the relevant party’s list of candidates. This voting system was used to ensure the overall Assembly reflects how all of London voted. As the Labour landslide meant we gained the constituency seat for Wandsworth & Merton, l fell off the 11 elected London-wide Assembly, as l was in fourth place in the Labour lists.  

But rest assure that l will be back somewhere in the London scene. 

As a councillor in Westminster one of my jobs was to help people through the process of getting housed by the city council. 

One of the people I helped has since come back to me for assistance in purchasing their property under Right to Buy (RTB), and while I am no longer a councillor, I thought I’d take a look. 

What struck me was the valuation of the property, a staggering £500,000 for a 20 to 25 square metres bedsit. 

Well, that’s not surprising given that some of the developments nearby, like on Chiltern Street, are being sold for several million pounds for a two-bedroom flat!

It just goes to show how ordinary Londoners have been completely priced out of the housing market in the capital.  

Don’t take my word for it, we have had none other than Donald Toon, director of economic crime at the National Crime Agency, saying: “I believe the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. 

“Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK.”

Nowhere else has seen more skewing of the housing market than the City of Westminster, where a huge percentage of the UK properties bought by companies in off-shore tax havens are concentrated – with as many as one in 10 properties in the borough. 

More recently some 6,527 properties, in places like Pimlico, the West End and Edgware Road, were purchased by off-shore companies between 2010 and 2015. 

Dolphin Square in Pimlico has the highest concentration of off-shore companies buying up properties, followed by those in the West End. 

We’ve had children of the prime minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, buying up Park Lane and ex-prime minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi, buying up properties along Edgware Road. 

Incredibly, similar off-shore companies have also started buying up ex-RTBs on our council estates, like Cooper House in Church Street ward. 

Now surely not all off-shore companies can be seen in this light, but you have to stand up and listen when a Transparency International report of last year, “Corruption on your Doorstep: How corrupt capital is used to buy property in the UK”, suggests that £180million of property in the UK has been brought under criminal investigation as the suspected proceeds of corruption since 2004.  

This is believed to be only the tip of an iceberg of the scale of the proceeds of corruption invested in UK property. 

Furthermore, more than 75 of the properties under criminal investigation use off-shore corporate secrecy.

Interestingly, while the so-called Panama Papers have kicked off the interest in these off-shore companies, most are not registered in Panama but in British Overseas Territories & Crown Dependencies like British Virgin Islands, Guernsey, Isle of Man and Jersey, suggesting where we will have to act on the issue globally.

So what’s the Mayor of London got to say for himself? After all, much of this has happened in his time at City Hall. 

At first he was in denial, before he acknowledged the extent of the problem last year in an exchange with me at Mayor’s Question Time.  

More recently he’s not been keen to support some of the changes proposed to deal with the problem, backtracking on his position a year ago. 

So Boris Johnson has let London become the world’s money-laundering capital and not acted to stop allowing the super-rich to use off-shore companies to buy property. Money laundered through London’s property market leads to hyper-inflation in housing prices for ordinary Londoners.

While he may not have had the powers to deal with it, he certainly could have been an advocate of reforms to the housing market, such as making it a responsibility of estate agents to check buyers as much as sellers in any property transaction. 

Given the influence of ill-gotten gains on prices, let’s certainly hope the next Mayor of London intends to advocate for these reforms and much more.

This was published as a Forum piece in the West End Extra in the week beginning the 27th of April 2016. 

President Obama was not just making a noise over whether we should stay in the EU or not but quite literately over Marylebone & St Johns Wood with his helicopters, aided with the Met ones as well over the past weekend. 

If you want hear for yourself what is was like over Sunday lunchtime in Marylebone, when the President Obama had already left, please listen below;

It has been like this on and off since President Obama’s arrival on thursday night! 

I for one will be looking forward to the US embassy moving South of the river but l am not sure if the US ambassador will move his residential home to the new site in Nine Elms as well.

If future Presidents of the US continue to stay in Regents Park, l just ask for some consideration of the noise caused by their helicopters over the park and thus neighbourhoods like St John’s Wood, Marylebone & Primrose Hill! 

Last week’s AGM of the Soho Society was meant to be a consultation for Crossrail 2 works under Soho. It turned out to be a much more contention affair as Crossrail 2 didn’t offer Soho residents any choices at all for the consultation, this after making out it was doing a favour undertaking it during purdah for the Mayoral & London Assembly elections! 

In comparison residents of Chelsea, have been given choices all the way through their consultation various stages and Crossrail 2 and the Mayor are having to respond to their petition concerning the Kings Rd location of the Crossrail station sent to the final London Assembly meeting of the term. 

The choice for residents has included also Cremorne Gardens and or not stopping at all through the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea at earlier stages of the consultations. More recently serious consideration is being given to moving the Crossrail station to Imperial Wharf as an alternative, in the adjacent borough with new housing consideration a key factor.

In contrast the residents of Soho at the Soho Society AGM were being presented with a “fait accompli” by Crossrail 2 as it insisted that Crossrail 2 needs to connect with Crossrail 1 at this point in Soho. An excellent point was made by one resident who asked whether before ploughing ahead with it, should not consideration be given to the actual street movement of people after Crossrail 1 is operational in 2018? An excellent point and we should also add the pedestrianization of Oxford St which both major Mayoral candidates are committed too as well during the next term ( 2016-2020 ).  

The very least Crossrail should offer is calling the new station after Soho Square, given all the hardship residents of Soho will have to put up with for another 10-15 years of building works immediately after the Crossrail 1 work ends! 

Investigations into off-shore company ownership of properties in Church St Ward, City of Westminster reveal very surprisingly that they have been buying up ex-Right to Buy (RtB) properties in council blocks. An example is Coopers House, St Lyons Place, NW8 where we have as many as 4 properties.

The City of Westminster has the biggest concentration of properties owned by off-shore companies registered in places like British Virgin Islands and Panama in the UK. But the investigation into Church St Wards shows its not been happening just in the posh parts of Westminster like Mayfair but also into local Council Estates. It must mean the private landlords are renting out these properties have found ways to dodge paying their capital gains taxes and maybe other forms of taxes.

 The data above was provided by Private Eye list of foreign owned properties in the UK.  For full details on foreign owned properties in Church St Ward, please see click here for the full breakdown Church Street property map

With the revelations of the #panamapapers, whats the Mayor of London, got to say about money-laundering in London? 

Well you can see from the video link above his verbal response to my questioning on the matter but only last month l asked where he was in stopping money laundering in London. It sounds to me he’s backtracking on the matter, from the response l got below;

Stopping Money Laundering in London

Question No: 2016/1207

Murad Qureshi

Is it not time for estate agents to run checks on the buyers of properties, as they are legally obliged to do with sellers, at least at the top end of the housing market in Central London?

Written response from the Mayor

Responsibility for anti-money laundering activities has recently been transferred from the Office for Fair Trading to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. HMRC are now enforcing the Money Laundering Regulations 2007, which require estate agents to take adequate measures to verify the identity of customers and beneficial owners. Failure to comply can result in a criminal record or an unlimited fine.

The Government has also said it will launch a consultation on how to stop entities in offshore tax havens from owning property in the UK anonymously.

I trust and hope he is not going to backtrack on the matter, with the release of the #panamapapers and its links with money laundering in London.

At Mayors Question Time (MQT) on the 17th of June last year, so shown above l got the following response from the Mayor when l raised concerns about tube noise from residents who lived near Baker Street tube station ” We are going to have a 24 hour Tube but we cannot be rattling people’s teacups at 3.00am and so we will sort it out “. So it was clear that he would deal with tube noise issue before launching the 24 hour tube service in localities like Baker Street. 

Coming now to the end of his term, l thought l should raise the Baker Street Tube noise issue again in written form this time and l got the following response, after quoting what he had said and asking whether he was satisfied that TfL had addressed these concerns  before the night service begins? 

The written response is as follows:

” TfL works to prevent noise and vibration issues through regular maintenance and improvement work. It has a robust process of investigating any noise or vibration complaints and will carry out remedial work to manage and mitigate the issues as required, including on lines that operate Night Tube. This is happening across the network.

TfL undertook planned maintenance on the Jubilee line in the Baker Street area in August 2015, and grinding of ‘rough’ rail in this section in February 2016. Both of these actions have resulted in incremental decreases in noise.

TfL will continue to engage with the local community over any concerns and regularly monitor the condition of rail and track condition to manage appropriate levels of noise in the lead up to Night Tube becoming operational, and once the service has begun ”

It’s clear to me that his officials have got to him and given this rather bureaucratic response. As a result l thought l needed to get the issue more attention and managed to get into the ES under the header Boris Johnson must tackle tube noise before rising in 24 hour service. Surely this should have been sorted by now almost 10 months since l raised it with him directly but it clear it has not been undermost in his mind when delivering the 24 hour tube service as part of his legacy to London. So watch this space for any further developments? 

Notices like those above have been put up in Tube stations telling Londoners about the Mayoral and London Assembly elections on the 5th of May. What they won’t realise is that the whole of strategic London government has shut down to observe purdah as well.  

Now purdah is the borrowed British political term ( from the Indian sub-continent ) used for the period before elections to make sure the political systems do not influence the outcome of the elections themselves. But the problem l have with it is that it comes so early with these GLA elections, in this instance well before the Easter break, that it appears just an excuse for officers to put their feet up with a cuppa for over six weeks before an elections.

Its stops us doing our work representing Londoners, while Monitoring Officers tell us we can’t use resources to political ends as public meetings at City Hall come to a complete stand still. Major demonstrations in London are constrained as these may unduly influence the election result and we can’t even twitter photos of site visits! 

Now why should this happen much earlier than for local or general elections?  Lords knows but the legislation is plainly wrong here, as l’m not sure City Hall has as much influence as say local councils in the lead-up to General Elections. Indeed City Hall shut up shop much sooner than local councils like City of Westminster before last years General Elections!!! So while l carefully go about doing my job, l do wonder if purdah has not gone mad at the GLA. 

With extensive courage of LOBO’s in the last week ( ES, Independent & FT ) or so, particularly the exposure that UK Councils have up and down the country, lets not forget its another scandal the financial sector has inflicted on its customers.

Like Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) miss-selling by the B5, the LOBO’s (Lender Option Borrower Option’s) is really the miss-selling of derivatives to clients like Councils for whom trading in derivatives is illegal.

The miss-selling of LOBOs (Lender Option Borrower Option) to local authorities is not dissimilar to the Big 5 miss-selling of PPI to their customers as clearly derivatives use are buried in them which are “ultra vires” or illegal for local government to invest in on behalf of their residents. This is illustrated well in the case against Hammersmith & Fulham in 1989. So just like PPI miss-selling, LA’s caught up in it should be compensated fully by those who sold them these financial products without  highlighting what it involved.

Unfortunately the LOBOs scandal can be added to the many other scandals we have had in the financial sector recently like the bail-out of RBS, Libor fixing, PPI compensation by big 5 for miss-selling to customers, to name but a few. It just adds to further calls for structural reform of the financial sector in the UK immediately. 

Over 90% of residents recently surveyed in the Marylebone area say they are disturbed by noise and vibrations from the Tube, with some experiencing both. The results also found that 87% of local residents surveyed are either “very concerned” or “a little bit concerned” that introduction of the Night Tube would make noise disturbance worse.

I launched the survey after being contacted by a number of residents in the Baker Street area whose lives are being disrupted by increasing noise and vibration from tube trains running under their homes.  Local residents responding to my survey reported pictures shifting on walls, rattling windows and even shaking beds caused by vibrations from the underground, with one respondent saying:

“Even though being on the top fifth floor, over the past year the noise has become more noticeable. Due to the late running of the service I have to wear ear plugs to get to sleep. It is going to be an absolute nightmare when night service is introduced.”

The survey results come after an internal TfL risk assessment for Night Tube, obtained by the Times newspaper via a Freedom of Information request, revealed residents living near to tube tracks or stations are likely to face significant increases in noise disturbance when the Night Tube is introduced. The risk assessment stated that the nuisance noise could result in a “reduction in quality of life of residents through disturbed sleep” and even “threats of suicide.”

TfL should use the delayed introduction of the Night Tube to repair all the identified sections of track and should set up a ‘noise-busters’ team to ensure noisy sections of track are quickly identified in future and prioritised for replacement or maintenance.

The survey results clearly show the extent of the problem. This isn’t just a bit of noise effecting residents on the ground floor every now and then. This is a constant and significant disruption even for people living five storeys above the tracks. Many residents said that the noise and vibration has increased in the past couple of years and it’s a real worry that TfL can’t get this sorted.

Marylebone residents desperately need some respite from these continuous disturbances. Setting up a noise-busters team to respond to complaints and quickly identify and fix noisy sections of Night Tube tracks would go a long way to making life better for Londoners living near tube lines.”

You can read the full survey results here:  Tube noise survey results