Housing officials evict elderly and move into their homes

£52,000-a-year chief is paying £47 a week rent

A council official with responsibility for helping the homeless has evicted elderly and frail tenants from their cottages and moved into one of them at a low rent with a fellow senior housing officer. 

Council officers decided to let the vacated sheltered housing in a prime city-centre spot to their colleagues and advertised the places on the council’s intranet without seeking the approval of elected councillors, a Times investigation has found. 

Now Norwich City Council is examining how Kristine Reeves, a £52,000-a-year head of neighbourhood and strategic housing, has become the tenant of a one-bedroom bungalow with a £47-a-week rent. 

Ms Reeves, 38, chairs the East of England regional homelessness advisory panel and is housing boss for Norwich, which has 7,589 households on its waiting list – another of her responsibilities. 

Land Registry documents state that she bought a three-storey private house worth an estimated £190,000 with a different man four years ago. 

Former occupants of Greyhound Opening, a postwar sheltered housing scheme, spoke of their distress at being forced to leave their homes, neighbours and gardens to be dispersed to old people’s accommodation around the city. Pensioners say that the council has reduced the rent from the £69 a week they paid and allows its staff to cohabit with boyfriends and girlfriends although the elderly tenants had been required to live alone. 

Half the current occupants work for the city’s housing department. Privately rented one-bedroom flats in Norwich were being advertised yesterday for £350 to £750 a month. 

The Times approached Ms Reeves, who lectures at national housing conferences on her specialist topic of “sub-regional excellence”, as she emerged from her cottage, which still has a handrail by the front door. 

She co-wrote a paper last year recommending that the council’s executive demolish the 25 homes set amid tree-shaded lawns and replace them with 100 high-density flats and houses after – as she described it – “decanting” the inhabitants. 

Instead of paying a security company to preserve the buildings from squatters and vandals until they were demolished, officials unilaterally decided to let them to employees. 

Ms Reeves pointed out that this strategy had the merit that it would “continue the rent roll”. 

She is registered as living in the flat along with Graham Ross, another senior Norwich housing official whose specialist field is increasing private-sector leases. 

She declined to say why she was living there or to discuss the house she bought, saying: “I’m very surprised that you’re looking into my personal details like that.” 

Asked what would happen to the carved wooden benches on the green where residents used to rest, and the flower boxes dedicated to the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, she said: “We are going to recycle as much as we can.” 

Standing outside her home, she said: “From here, this looks like a nice scheme. It looks a bit Toytownish but these are not fit-for-purpose units at all. The bedroom doesn’t accommodate a double bed. 

“It’s not well insulated — I can tell you they are really very cold. You couldn’t swing a cat in it.” 

Asked if the homes could have been used for the homeless, she said: “I can’t see how it would have helped because it wouldn’t be permanent housing.” 

Olive Frost, 78, who has had a heart bypass, said she missed going to the shops now that she has been moved to a housing complex with a poor bus service on the outskirts of the city.  continues here

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