Sam Wollaston

speaker

167 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 29 Jun

Sam Wollaston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Today in Focus · Life on the porch of an empty mansion · 29 Jun 2026 podcast

And Westminster, where Rutland Gate is, it's one in 10 properties are empty.

I mean, London also has the most pressing housing needs.

1.3 million households waiting for somewhere to live in England, of which 340,000 are in London.

So it has the highest number of empties and it has the most pressing housing needs.

Yes.

Pretty accurate, I think.

I mean, London's also the centre of offshore registered properties.

So £80 billion worth of offshore registered property in the country.

London's the hub of that with about 47,000 properties.

And again, zooming in further on that, Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster are both really high on those lists.

So in layman's terms, it means that there are lots of properties in this part of London which are owned by billionaires.

We don't know where they are and they are currently empty.

So I spoke to Roland Atkinson, who's a professor at Sheffield University, and he's wrote a really good book called Alpha City, How London Was Captured by the Super Rich.

He talks about them buying for two reasons, buying either just simply as a portfolio, something you just put on your property portfolio, or they do use them, but only use them for a few weeks a year.

So they do literally just jet in on their private jets, get chauffeured into their places.

Yeah.

and go up in the lift and get service from the hotel next door.

And they have no connection to the place they're living in, which is actually very much like the succession.

The reason is simple.

It's just we're building the wrong kinds of houses.

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