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Landlords can't evict vice girls
Prostitution crisis caused by lengthy county court process
SOHO’S biggest landlords have blasted the county court system for being too slow in helping them evict known prostitutes.
Richard Metcalfe, who works for landlord Consolidated, with 300 tenants in Soho, said the inside dealings of the Soho sex trade were costing his company thousands of pounds.
The problem is so bad that police have set up a special monitoring station in one of their properties in Charing Cross Road.
Landlords are ethically bound not to collect from tenants known to be paying rent through illicit earnings.
But because the eviction process – handled at the London County Court in Marylebone – takes up to eight months they are losing thousands of pounds a year in rent.
Mr Metcalfe said there were prostitutes, known and identified by police, living in their flats – and because of the slowness of the eviction process they are living scot-free, sometimes for up to eight months.
He said: “The system needs to be re-addressed. There has to be a fast track. It takes around six months for us to get these people evicted. This is not based on hearsay evidence. The police know, we know and residents living in the block know. Proceedings at the Central London Country Court can take six to eight months. Because it undermines are case if we have been collecting rent from them. The whole thing is frustrating and unjust.”
Vice cops last week swooped on one of the landlord’s properties in Charing Cross. They served a woman identified as running a brothel in the block with an eviction order after intelligence revealed she had been running a brothel. The landlords changed the locks – but even though she has agreed to move out – they have been forced to return her keys.
Mr Metcalfe said: “Our legal advisors have told us it is the only thing we could do. We knew it was being used for prostitution and didn’t want it to be.
“But under legal advice we had to return the keys.”
A spokesman for the County Court said: “Every case is a specific set of circumstances, so it’s not possible to give an exact timetable for how long it will take to evict someone.” |
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