Labour’s candidate for mayor of Newham, an east London borough with one of the highest rates of homelessness in the UK, bought a council-subsidised home despite already being a homeowner, documents seen by Novara Media appear to show. A Green councillor for the borough has called for an investigation and an external audit.

If elected mayor of Newham on 7 May, Forhad Hussain will oversee the 387,000 residents and an annual budget of around £400m. Yet Hussain – whose first pledge as would-be mayor is to “enforce the rules” – appears to have had the rules bent for him by Labour-run Newham council, while Hussain served as a council cabinet member.

This would not be the first time Newham has bent the rules on housing: in November last year, the police opened a criminal investigation after a council housing officer was alleged to have committed “serious housing fraud” by allocating dozens of properties intended as temporary accommodation to “ineligible individuals”.

The documents seen by Novara Media show that in 2016, while a sitting Labour councillor, Hussain – who in 2011 declared his ownership of one property in the borough – bought a second under the Right to Buy scheme.

The Right to Buy scheme is designed for non-homeowners and for existing council tenants, neither of which Hussain was. The property also sat in a disused council building, making it technically ineligible for Right to Buy, as it had no sitting tenants.

The documents show that the second property was, confusingly, purchased both as part of the Right to Buy scheme and as part of a council shared ownership scheme, which also requires that shared owners not be existing homeowners.

The shared ownership scheme’s rules also state that properties must be sold at market value. This raises the question of whether the property was sold to Hussain at a cut price, as Right to Buy properties usually are.

The title deed of the first property suggests that Hussain’s brother, Fokrul, bought the property in 2004. However, Forhad Hussain listed himself as the property’s owner on his councillor’s register of interests in 2011. He also listed the address on several Companies House entries as recently as 2019.

Hussain served as a Labour councillor in Newham between 2010 and 2018, during which time he was a cabinet member. His LinkedIn suggests that he has since worked as a consultant for the engineering and management consultancy Arcadis, working on an infrastructure project in Kent.

It was during Hussain’s time as a Labour councillor in Newham that the authority developed NewShare, a shared ownership scheme to help address the borough’s major housing crisis.

There are 7,343 households in temporary accommodation in Newham, around one in every 16 households and more than anyone else in the country; the UK borough average is 522. The borough has the second-highest council house waiting list in the capital, with 36,625 households waiting to receive a council home.

The council’s 16,000 council houses are of notoriously poor quality. In 2023, the housing ombudsman found “severe maladministration” of housing stock, prompting the housing secretary to write to the borough. In October 2024, the regulator of social housing gave the council the lowest possible grade, the first time it had ever issued a C4. A more recent inspection by the social housing regulator, published in December, concluded that “widespread issues” remain in Newham.

Opposition politicians have queried whether Hussain is the person to address such issues, given his apparent personal property dealings.

Areeq Chowdhury, the Green Party’s candidate for mayor of Newham and a member of Newham council’s audit and governance committee, has written to the council’s chief executive demanding an investigation into the property deal.

“The dossier raises serious questions about the acquisition of a council property by Labour’s candidate for mayor of Newham,” Chowdhury said in a statement.

“With the election just weeks away, voters in Newham deserve to be provided with full transparency over this matter before they go to the polls.

“Given the council is run by a Labour administration and is currently under police investigation for serious housing fraud, the matter should be investigated externally and impartially to establish the facts as to why an apparently home-owning cabinet member was given a subsidised council property.

“The dossier further underlines the need for fresh leadership in Newham. If the council doesn’t act now, the Labour party should suspend Mr Hussain while they investigate the matter themselves.”

The news comes as the Green party launches a local election campaign focused largely on housing, which it has found is a key issue on the doorstep. At the party’s campaign launch in Deptford, southeast London on Thursday morning, party leader Zack Polanski attacked Labour’s record on social and affordable housing. He accused Labour of cosying up to developers, noting that housing secretary Steve Reed recently hosted a £2,000-a-seat curry night for housing developers, and called for Labour to institute rent controls (which only central government can do).

Also speaking at the event, the Greens’ mayoral candidate for Lewisham, Liam Shrivastava, cited Labour-run Lewisham council’s Lewisham Filigree development, which currently sits empty after more than 400 residents were relocated due to a burst water main. Shrivastava also noted that just 6% of the new Lewisham shopping centre is social housing.

An internal memo seen by Novara Media, and first reported on by the Times, suggests that the Green party is to make housing a central attack line for the local elec tions: “If we had to prioritise one focussed message on this to secure the maximum Labour to Green switchers: ‘Failing Labour councils’ are ‘in hock to developers’ and allow them to break promises to deliver social and affordable housing – particularly larger homes suitable for families,” the memo says.

Neither Hussain, Newham Labour nor Labour HQ responded to Novara Media’s requests for comment.

From Novara Media via This RSS Feed.