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Millionaires' Row 2009:

How hundreds of families get luxury homes on benefits far beyond the means of most working people

By PAUL BRACCHI
Last updated at 8:40 AM on 19th December 2009

Their magnificent townhouse overlooks a courtyard and is in one of the most expensive areas of London.

It has four storeys, six bedrooms (some with balconies), three sitting rooms and four bathrooms - as well as a concierge service.

The property is worth a cool £1.8 million and would cost you or me nearly £1,600 a week to rent.

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Luxury: Francesca Walker and three of her eight children. The family is housed in a £2.6million London villa in Notting Hill, London

So who do you think lives here. Is it: (a) a banker; (b) an MP fiddling expenses; or (c) an unemployed former asylum seeker and her family?

The last answer is the correct one.

In other words, taxpayers are picking up the £6,400-a-month bill to keep Nasra Warsame, seven of her brood and her elderly mother in the lap of luxury.

Mrs Warsame's husband and their eighth child, by the way, have been provided with a two-bedroom council flat nearby. His wife's palatial residence isn't big enough, apparently, to accommodate them all.

So how is Mrs Warsame enjoying her publicly-funded mansion?

There was no response when we 'buzzed' her state-of-the art video intercom which allows her to screen visitors.

No one could blame her for keeping a low profile (if that's possible in such a grand home), considering that her case, among others, prompted the Government's announcement this week that benefit rules are to be changed.

For the Warsames are one of a number of families enjoying life on Millionaires' Row, courtesy of our welfare state system. Let's take a quick tour.

First stop, David Cameron's trendy neighbourhood of Notting Hill and a £2.6million villa with wooden floors, granite work tops and roof terrace - home to single mother-of-eight Francesca Walker.

Francesca, whose mother is Jamaican, spent many years in a succession of council flats, which she claimed were virtually uninhabitable.

As a result, the council was forced to consider her as 'technically homeless'.

Unfair: 800 households in Westminster qualify for £500-a-week housing allowance, at a cost of £27.3million

Her eight children are fathered by two different men and she was housed in a privately-owned villa because the council had no suitable accommodation of its own.

Next is a detached, double-fronted £1.2million house in Acton, West London, with three shower rooms and 'accessories' including a 50-in plasma TV, laptops, Wii, iPhone and PlayStation - home to the seven-strong Saiedi family from Afghanistan.

Then there is the £1million mock-Tudor property, comprising two sitting rooms, conservatory and double garage, in Edgware (home to single mother-of-five Omowunmi Odia), and another £1million property in Barnet (home to the Connors, a family of Irish travellers).

In fact, 16 families are living in million-pound-plus London properties funded by the controversial Local Housing Allowance, which allows people to rent from private landlords and hand the bill to the state.

These examples alone cost us £2.4million a year - enough to put at least 100 extra police officers on the streets of the capital.

But this isn't the real story, or not all of the story, anyway. It gets even worse.

Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper insists 'very high rents' represent only a 'small proportion' of overall housing allowance claims.

Well, that depends on how you define 'very high'. Does £1,000-a-week fall into this category?

The Mail has learned that around 100 households, mostly in London, now receive this amount via their local authority.

How many families can afford monthly mortgage repayments of £4,000?

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it could not provide us with figures for those claiming £500 a week without receiving a Freedom of Information request in writing, which means Christmas would have come and gone by the time we got an answer.

But Tory-run Westminster Council, which has been left to pick up the flak over Mrs Warsame, was happy to oblige. Funnily enough, no Freedom of Information request was required.

In fact, a staggering 800 households in the borough qualify for £500-a-week payments.

Or, to put it another way, they are living in properties that, back in the real world, they would only be able to afford if they were earning between £70,000 and £80,000 a year.

The average salary in this country, remember, is a little more than £20,000 a year.

The annual bill for the 'Westminster 800'? A shameful £27.3 million. The statistics for other London boroughs are equally outrageous.

Is there anyone - apart from the staff of The Guardian - who doesn't think this is a scandal; a two-fingered salute, metaphorically speaking, to every family in Britain which isn't milking the benefits system?

So how in God's name did we arrive here?

New rules have created a benefits "postcode lottery"

The Local Housing Allowance was introduced in April 2008 and was supposed to make the system fairer.

Payments are based not just on individual circumstances, such as the size of the household, but also on the area of the country where you happen to be living.

So, for example, a family of five who qualify for housing benefit in Westminster would be entitled to more than a family of five in Birmingham, because, generally speaking, properties are more expensive to rent in Westminster than Birmingham.

The country was broken into Broad Market Rental Areas for this purpose, and average rents for properties worked out.

But it has created what has been described as a 'postcode lottery in housing benefits': for example, in London, where rents are highest, a family will receive a commensurately higher sum than an equivalent family in a cheaper area.

Everyone wins - apart, that is, from the taxpayer.

Thirty-six-year-old Mrs Saiedi spoke to us, through her daughter, on the doorstep of her mansion. Mrs Saiedi does not speak English herself.

'There is a story behind why my family is living in this house, but no one wants to listen,' she said.

'If I do speak, my words just get twisted. It's OK for us to be in this house, but I don't want to explain why it is OK because you will say it is not OK.'

In fact, we do know Mrs Saiedi's story. She has done nothing wrong legally. But that is precisely the point.

Mrs Saiedi, who had her first child at the age of 13, came to Britain with her family in 2001 - a year after her husband had arrived in London, fleeing the Taliban, and claimed asylum.

The couple now live separately.

The Saiedis lived in two previous properties paid for by local authorities before winning the 'postcode jackpot' - to use the words of the (dismayed) leader of Ealing Council - in July last year, just a few months after the introduction of the Local Housing Allowance.

No one can blame them for moving into a seven-bedroom house with a 100ft garden.

Nevertheless, the sight of her 21-year-old son Jawad pulling up onto the drive in an almost new Mini Cooper is not exactly good PR for a family receiving so many state handouts. Nor is the huge plasma television set in the lounge.

Then, again, plasma TVs and computers have become practically synonymous with the benefit-claiming class in Britain.

At least the Saiedis don't cause any trouble - unlike the Irish traveller family who have been dubbed '£1million neighbours from hell' in a leafy avenue on the outskirts of the North London commuter belt.

The driveway of this impressive five-bedroom house in Totteridge is covered in weeds and the hedges are overgrown. In the past, there have been piles of rubbish outside, not to mention overflowing drains.

John and Serena Connors - dressed in trademark white vests and tracksuit bottoms - have been in residence here with their seven children since February.

They have been accused of waging a campaign of intimidation and anti-social behaviour in the vicinity.

A Mini Cooper is on the drive, a plasma TV in the lounge

The way Mrs Connors tells it, though, you'd think butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.

'We are good people, we're good neighbours, and this is our home,' she insisted yesterday.

Either way, their neighbours are paying for the privilege of having the Connors in their street to the tune of £2,400 a month.

The Connors are one of 59 families in Barnet who qualify for £500 a week or more in housing benefit at an annual cost to taxpayers of at least £1.9 million.

Could there be a more glaring example of the rank injustice of the current system?

Back in Westminster, the anger and frustration over claimants like Nasra Warsame was laid bare in a letter sent last month to Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper.

It was from Philippa Roe, cabinet member for housing on the borough council.

'I am extremely concerned that the current system fails to offer taxpayers value for money,' she wrote.

''This issue is all the more pressing in the current economic climate. The Government has repeatedly pledged to reform housing benefit, but to date has failed to do so.'

And Mrs Warsame, it now emerges, who claimed asylum with her husband after leaving Somalia in 1991 (they were granted citizenship and all their children, aged between two and 16, were born in Britain) is not even the highest claimant on the authority's books.

Westminster Council revealed to us that two households receive £1,950 and £1,750 a week respectively through the Local Housing Allowance.

Three others get the same amount as the Warsames - namely £1,600; while three families are on more than £1,500 a week.

'It's just wrong,' said Councillor Roe. 'Many people spend hours and huge sums of money commuting to work in London because they can't afford to live in the capital.

'Meanwhile, we are housing people - some of whom have just arrived at Victoria coach station from others parts of Britain or abroad - in often very expensive properties.

'We, or should I say the Government, need to step back and ask: "Is this really sensible?"'

This week, the Government did finally set out measures to tackle some of the problems Councillor Roe and many others have highlighted.

Alternatives may include giving rent officers the right to exclude the top 5 to 10 per cent of rental properties, so people are not placed in accommodation that 'other working households in the area could not afford', and setting average rates based on smaller geographical areas so that Acton, for example, is not placed in the same bracket as Westminster.

A cap has since been placed on payments for any property with five bedrooms or more, but this limit varies from one council to another.

And as a DWP spokesman pointed out: 'We won't be kicking families out of their homes, and they would have six months from their review date to find more appropriate accommodation.

'We want the system to be fair, both to families in need and to the taxpayer.'

Given what our inquiries have unearthed, many taxpayers might find that last comment a little hard to stomach - particularly those living in Westminster.

Here's one final statistic to ponder.

In five other London boroughs, including Islington, and Hammersmith and Fulham, 722 families each receive a Local Housing Allowance of £2,000 a month - which adds up to more than £30million a year of taxpayers' money.

And this at a time of the worst recession in living memory.

A time when, apart from anything else, we can't afford even to send our troops into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan with the proper equipment.

Could there be a more potent example of just how wrong-headed this country has become?