Fifteen illegal and dangerous private properties let out in Sandwell have been shut down by a special housing team over the past year as part of a wider blitz on crimes linked to poor housing.
Sandwell Council’s Housing Quality Team closed down the properties after finding them in a dangerous condition or being illegally-converted buildings, including former factories.
The council is one year into a two-year, government-funded programme designed to help target poor housing, often linked to serious organised crime, sexual exploitation, slavery and drugs.
The government-backed Controlling Migration Fund is being used by the council to work with partner agencies to intervene and shut down unfit properties due to dangerous conditions or illegal building conversions that risk the lives of those living within them.
The project links into a wider multi-agency initiative with involvement from West Midlands Police, UK Border Agency, Sandwell Children’s Trust and the council’s planning, council tax, building control and trading standards teams as part of an anti-slavery partnership working team – Sandwell’s Slavery and Human Trafficking Operational Partnership (SHOP).
Properties targeted under the projects have included a factory in Smethwick where illegal workers and a child were found to be living in exceptionally poor conditions.
In residential areas, some properties had been found to have been used to grow cannabis and left in such poor states of repair that the council had no other alternative but to shut them down until works were carried out to make the houses liveable again.
Prohibition orders, made by the council to prevent unsafe buildings from being used for residential purposes, have been an effective tool is shutting down dangerous lets across the borough that have been used in many cases to house vulnerable individuals linked with trafficking, slavery, drugs and other crimes.
Councillor Joanne Hadley, Sandwell Council’s cabinet member for homes, said: “We are actively working to protect the residents and good landlords of Sandwell from unscrupulous individuals who are responsible for housing vulnerable people in dangerous buildings to earn profit over human safety and decency.
“The council is taking a robust and nationally leading role in joint agency work to tackle this type of misuse and prohibition orders have been a key tool in this ongoing work.”
The Controlling Migration Fund project has funding for another 12 months and will continue to work closely with partners through the anti-slavery partnership to tackle poor housing conditions and related crimes.
