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Skipping scandal hits garage
£4,000 worth of goods vanish
THOUSANDS of pounds worth of tools and clothing was cleared from a council tenant’s storage cupboard without her permission and in breach of the council’s own rules, the Town Hall has admitted.
Tax-payers will have to fork out to compensate Vivian Green, of Abingdon Close, Camden Town, because a series of blunders led to the storage shed she rents along with her flat being broken into and emptied by clearance teams working for the council.
Rather than being inventoried and stored, in accordance with council regulations, the goods were ‘disposed of’, Mrs Green has been told, in a case with echoes of the story of Dorothy Robinson.
A five-week New Journal investigation into the clearance of Mrs Robinson’s Gospel Oak flat as she lay dying in a nursing home revealed that furniture from her home turned up at a nearby antique shop despite council claims that it had been “disposed of in a skip”.
Although the council initially claimed that an inventory had been taken in her case, when the New Journal asked to see it, they admitted that a full inventory had not been made.
Mrs Green has fought for compensation since her shed was emptied in October 2005 by a clearance team working for the council’s District Housing Office. By the time she found about it, £4,000 worth of goods including a valuable mink coat, high quality tools belonging to her late husband, and a hand-made crib belonging to a friend had all vanished.
In letters, housing office officials admitted that the shed had been cleared because the council had no record of who rented it, despite the fact that Mrs Green had paid 75p per week for 14 years for the lockable cupboard in the stairwell of her block of flats.
One letter states: “By disposal I did mean destroyed. An inventory of the goods was not taken by our staff or by the contractor who removed the goods.”
Later letters offer ‘full and final’ compensation packages, rising from £1,000 in May 2006 to £2,100 last August, but Mrs Green has refused them because she resents the council’s “arrogance and incompetence combined”.
She said: “This would have been so easy to avoid. All they had to do was to write to everyone in the estate- it is not a big block – and ask them who used which shed. Instead they went ahead by putting a note on the shed door which I didn’t see. Its farcical that they don’t have records, but even after it happened, they have tried to browbeat me.”
Mrs Green is awaiting a date for her claim to go to court.
A council press official said: “We accept that we shouldn’t have happened and proper procedures were not followed and have offered compensation to Mrs Green, but this has been turned down.”
“We are currently reviewing procedures and protocols.”
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