You're listening to Death in Westminster, a podcast from Novara Media, produced by Planet B Productions. Episode 1, The Station. The next station is Westminster. Doors will open. Where were you on the evening of the 18th of December, 2018? Maybe you were doing some last-minute Christmas shopping, or buying a round at an office party, or getting ready to travel home for the holidays. Well, I can tell you one thing. If you happened to be out on the streets of London that night, you'd have been feeling the chill.
The weather forecast predicted broken clouds, and a recent cold snap had seen temperatures drop towards freezing. It was a Tuesday, and central London was bustling. In Westminster, the political heart of the city, members of Parliament and lobby journalists were making their way home. Many of them were using the public underpass that connects the Houses of Parliament to Westminster Tube Station. If any of them had glanced down, they might have seen a man in early middle age curled up for warmth. He was taught.
with a shaved head, a salt and pepper goatee, and a kindly demeanour that made his friends call him a gentle giant. His name was Julia Ramesh. He was 43 years old and he was getting ready to spend the night there, right there on the tunnel floor. In the winter of 2018, the underpass on Parliament's doorstep was a popular choice for London's rough sleepers. It offered a little shelter from the cold and the chance to pick up some spare change from passers-by. It was also the sort of place where you could find a little bit of safety in numbers, maybe even have a little drink and a smoke with friends before settling down for the night.
In fact, the way those who were there remember it, there was something of a festive atmosphere that December evening. It was only a week till Christmas, after all. On the night of the 18th of December, events were about to take a tragic turn. At around 11pm, as he sat there drinking and talking with friends, Jula started choking and gasping for air. Jula's friend, Gabor, who was there that night, remembers seeing him lying on the ground, convulsing. He was all blue. We couldn't resuscitate him. That's an actor reading Gabor's words. We were so sad, shocked, panicking.
One of the other guys called the ambulance. We heard the next day he had died. How does this happen? Right on Parliament's doorstep, in the shadow of power in one of the richest cities on Earth. A man dies, cold and unseen. I'm Kojo Karam, writer and researcher, and ever since I first heard Jula's story in 2018, it's haunted me. Jula Ramesh died just metres from the buildings that govern Britain, surrounded by empty homes. Their lights off, their doors locked. How can someone lose everything in the heart of so much wealth?
Follow that question and the story widens into the hidden world that links money, secrecy and power. A world that decides who gets a home and who doesn't. I'm Kojo Karam and this is Death in Westminster. My name is Simon Hattonstone. I'm a journalist at The Guardian. I had started working with my colleague Daniel Lavelle, and we wanted to do a series that humanised the lives of homeless people because we thought so often they were reduced to statistics. I wanted to know more about Jula, and there's no better journalist to ask than Simon Hattonstone. In 2019, Simon and Daniel turned their attention to Britain's Homeless, with a series of pieces about people who died on our streets. Jula's story was an obvious choice.
At the time, his death made headlines, but it was quickly forgotten. With a lot of the people, we told really full life stories. Actually, with Jula, we told a really good political story, I think, but it was much more difficult to tell his life story because we couldn't get to family. But we did find a friend. Simon means Gabor, Jula's friend, the one who found him dying in the Westminster underpass. Gabor and Jula first met at a day centre for rough sleepers next to Trafalgar Square, the heart of London's West End, just a few steps away from Parliament.
Gabor was half Jules' age, 22 to Jules' 43, but they both originally came from Hungary and the pair bonded. Simon explained how Gabor and Jules' daily trudge around Westminster meant they had a lot of time to get to know each other. In the mornings, Jules and Gabor would visit the day centre, where they showered and ate breakfast. In the afternoons, they would head to soup kitchens or go job hunting, and at night, they returned to their sleeping pictures at Westminster Station, off Parliament Square, under the shadows of Big Ben. He was a very good friend.
He'd always help you out if you're in trouble. He'd give you food or money if he had any. He was funny. He made a lot of jokes. He made people happy. As their friendship developed, Gabor learned more about Jula. He first came to the UK in the early 2000s. He worked as a kitchen porter but lost his job and ended up sleeping rough. In 2013, Jula left Britain and travelled through Europe looking for work, spending time in Malta and Paris as well as Hungary. Wherever he went, Gabor said, Jula was looking to build a life. He wanted a good job, a good house, a big family.
In September 2018, Jula came back to London. Without a job, he couldn't afford to rent a place to live. But because he'd recently arrived back in the country, he wasn't entitled to benefits unless he had a job. Without a safe, stable home and a fixed address, it was harder to find work. He was backed into a corner with no way out. In the winter of 2018, an estimated 24,000 people were sleeping rough on the streets or in cars, trains and tents across the UK. As Simon points out, once you end up homeless, it's very, very hard to get out again.
How could someone who, you know, kind of was homeless, who was freezing, who was trying his best to get a job, who was doing part-time work, how couldn't he qualify for a hostel? It just seemed really impossible to us. As I say, it seemed Kafkaesque. This was a bad time to be down and out in London. In 2018, the street homeless population was exploding. The number of people sleeping rough had more than tripled in the wake of the global financial crisis. And nowhere was it worse than Westminster, which has the highest number of rough sleepers of anywhere in the UK.
In this country, local councils have the main responsibility for ensuring people have a roof over their heads. But by the 2010s, councils weren't coping. My name is Karen Buck. I was a Labour Member of Parliament for North Westminster and North Kensington at different points. Karen is a veteran politician and housing campaigner. As well as being an MP for the area, she served as a local councillor in Westminster too. Today, she's the chair of the campaign organisation Generation Rent.
I asked Karen how Westminster found itself at the epicentre of a national housing crisis. She puts it partly down to public spending cuts. When we had the change of government in 2010, that all went, partly because of the cuts in welfare support, which meant people were not able to afford to sustain their own tenancies, and partly because of cuts in other services that just meant people were more vulnerable if they came out of prison, if they came out of an institution, if they were needing intervention for alcohol or drug addiction or mental health problems. The level of support just evaporated. Karen also told me that these cuts arrived after years of councils being forced to sell off homes under the Right to Buy scheme, without being given enough money to replace them.
We simply no longer have the level of social housing that we had 15 years ago, 20, 25 years ago, and yet we're dealing with an increased level of need. My casework was absolutely dominated by housing, totally dominated. in my small office, we would be dealing with thousands of cases a year of complaints, which would range from the Housing Association Council tenants with disrepair and overcrowding issues, and that was a substantial element, through all aspects of homelessness, from street homelessness to family homelessness, to tenants who would be concerned about their landlords. And these would be unreasonable rent rises. This would be a failure to carry out proper repairs, in some cases, illegal eviction. This isn't just a problem for Westminster, or even just London. It's all over the country.
The UK has absolutely by far the world's worst homelessness statistics. Its closest rival in terms of homeless people per head of population is Belgium, and the UK has roughly double the number of people in temporary accommodation as Belgium does. It dwarfs the US statistics and it's, yeah, it really is world-leading in its homelessness stats. That's Nick Banno, a housing lawyer and author. And if you look at statistics about housing provision, Britain's statistics are comparable to many other rich countries. We don't have a very severe shortage. What we certainly don't have is the sort of decline in housing availability that would be sufficient to explain how bad things have got in recent years, right? Housing experts spend a long time arguing.
of whether the UK is building enough homes. But Nick points to another problem. Only a generation ago, private landlords held just 7% of housing in the UK. Today, that figure has nearly tripled. One in five homes are now rented privately. Housing, something that we all need, is being hoarded. And that means if you can't afford it, you're pushed out and there's little social housing left to catch you. It's a big problem. And whether you're renting or paying a mortgage, it makes life harder for everyone. Well, almost everyone.
I mean, the UK's housing market is worth something like four times its FTSE 100 index. So it's big business. And that big business is driven by the immense profitability of the private rented sector, which in turn is driven by housing insecurity and the ability of private landlords to extract as much wealth as they possibly can from the population with this constant churn of homelessness and raising the price. In Westminster especially, there's another problem. One it seems no one is talking about.
And that's the sheer number of houses that are just sitting there, empty. In addition to homelessness, politicians in Westminster are dealing with another crisis, a crisis of too many empty homes. In some parts of Westminster Borough, more than 50% of the properties are now classed as long-term empty. Day after day, as Jula walked with Gabor, from the underpass to the shelter, to the food banks and back again, he walked past thousands of perfectly functional, well-insulated homes. Homes that were all but abandoned.
Wander about a mile from the underpass where Jula died, and you will find plush neighbourhoods like Belgravia and Mayfair, where rows of multi-storey mansions lie deserted all day, except for the occasional private security guard. But it's not just luxury homes. Around the corner in Pimlico, many of the modest three-bedroom houses where families once lived have letterboxes stuffed with months of uncollected leaflets. Wealthy investors, from inside and outside the UK, are snapping up property as a safe place to park their cash or to make money by waiting for the value to rise. As Karen Buck told me, it's turning parts of the borough into a ghost town.
In 2023, Westminster Council even set up a hotline for residents to report long-term empty homes. What I want to know is, who owns these homes? But that's a hard question to answer. The properties are often bought offshore. In other words, their ownership is registered not in mainland Britain, but in a tax haven, a small territory somewhere else in the world whose local laws allow a lot of secrecy.
The home might also be officially owned by trust or a shell company, making the individuals who ultimately benefit sometimes impossible to identify. And even when the homes are occupied by tenants, this concealed status causes problems. I worked very closely with the council over the issues affecting private landlords over many, many years, whether it was, again, it was disrepair or harassment or just simply failing to comply with the legal requirements that landlords must do in terms of the rights for their tenants. It became almost impossible to handle when some of these landlords were based overseas and behind a trust. Either you couldn't get in touch with them or you didn't even know where to go beyond a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands or somewhere. So it seriously undermined enforcement capacity.
A young couple got in touch with me. They were in their flat in Maida Vale with a representative of the landlord having let themselves in illegally into the property without warning to evict them with no legal recourse at all. And the tenants had no idea who the owner of the property was. Make no mistake, there is serious money involved here. Across England and Wales, there are nearly 150,000 properties owned by offshore vehicles. In London, they're estimated to be worth a combined £55 billion.
And all that money flooding into the capital helps drive up property prices, making London more expensive for everyone else. That's something Karen Burke has seen up close. If property is seen exclusively as an investment vehicle, particularly in London, for so many people, and it's very hard to understand who actually controls and owns them, that does have knock-on consequences. It's not a neat solution to the homelessness problem, but it is all part of the same story. On that grim winter day back in 2018, Jule was on the sharp end of Bryn's housing crisis.
He'd found the last few months hard. He'd always liked to drink, but towards the end of the year, he started to drink more and more. In October, he'd finally been accepted into a hostel, but had a strict no-alcohol policy, and he was kicked out after coming back late several nights in a row. He would tell me that he was only drinking because life was emotional, and because he wanted a job and felt alone. Early on the evening of the 18th of December, Jula was despondent. He complained that life was too tough and he didn't think he could carry on. But later that evening, as the drinks flowed, Jula cheered up. Life wasn't all that bad.
He'd recently found part-time work in a restaurant kitchen, and according to Gabor, he'd been offered a full-time position just the day before. Jula hoped this would be his route back to stability. His long-term ambition was to get his forklift truck driver's license. One of the things Simon told me he found most touching about Jula and Gabor's story is how they were checking on each other over the course of the night. Gabor slept above ground, outside a branch of Café Nero by the entrance to Westminster Cheap Station, whilst Jula would sleep down below. As Gabor told Simon and his colleague Daniel, the evenings always brought increased risks.
You sleep on the floor and it's dirty. You get drunk people coming out of clubs or going in, making noise. Jula was a bit scared being on the street. He always wanted to get off. That's why he was so determined to get a job. At around 10pm, Gabor left the underpass and went upstairs to sort out a sleeping pitch. An hour later, he came back down to say goodnight. That was the last time Gabor saw Jula alive. Jula Ramesh died in the early hours of the 19th of December 2018 in St Thomas Hospital, just across the river from Parliament.
Medical staff were unable to resuscitate him. Later that day, Keir Starmer, then a Labour shadow minister, broke the news to Parliament that yet another homeless man had died on their doorstep. It is grotesque and obscene that we have a homelessness crisis in this country, visible right outside this building. I do agree, and I'll be correct if I'm wrong, but I'm given to understand that tragically, one of those sleeping just outside the entrance and exit to this place died in the last 24 hours. The reaction was immediate. As charities called Jewelers' Death a national tragedy and a source of national shame, reporters descended on the underpass to interview his friends.
For a brief moment, it seemed as if things would change. Anonymous staff member in Parliament started a crowdfunder that raised £5,000 in two days for homeless charities. But what happened after that? That's my friend Dahlia Gabriel. She's London through and through, and she's the best person I can think of to help me explain this mess that I've started to uncover. Dahlia works at King's College London, just down the road from Westminster, and she's an expert in urban inequality.
A couple of years ago, we worked on a book together about the British state. I'll be coming back to Dahlia throughout the series. But for now, one thing's been puzzling me more than anything else. When Jula died, Westminster already had more homeless people than anywhere else in the country. And since then, homelessness applications in the borough have actually increased by more than 300%, according to Westminster Council. Things have been getting worse and worse. So how has this been allowed to happen? How can we still have so many people without homes when so many properties lie abandoned, often right next to them?
How's it all going? Yeah, I've been digging into this Julia Remesh story I was telling you about. How he died in Westminster, surrounded by all these empty homes. Yeah, I remember you saying. I mean, it's a tragedy. I've been reading what his friends had to say about him. It's just... Yeah, I mean...
completely just awful. I mean, actually, since you mentioned it to me, I did a little bit of digging around and I wanted to find out how many empty homes there were in the area where Jula passed away. And I found this figure. So let me get this up. Yeah. So there are currently 11,000 homes in Westminster that are long term empty. And some of these have been unoccupied for literally decades. And that figure, it's only getting bigger. And in London as a whole, the number of long term empty homes has risen by nearly 10% over the past.
five years. And I mean, what else have we seen increase over the past five years? Street homelessness, right? So what you had back in 2018 is Jula struggling on the street, hearing from everyone that there's nothing they can do to help him, all whilst, I mean, we don't know if he knew this or not, but every day he was walking past hundreds, if not thousands, of literal empty homes. And that's a problem that's only been getting worse, not any better. I mean, it's not just that they're left abandoned. I mean, it's almost like they're not even homes anymore.
I mean, these places aren't seen as somewhere where you can live. They're not there to shelter people. They're there to shelter money. Right. And so the question that we really need to be asking here is, how have we gotten to a point where the primary purpose of a home isn't to shelter a person, but is to, as you say, shelter money? And the irony that I always like to point out here is that, you know, one of the reasons why it would have been so difficult for someone like Jula specifically is the fact that he was...
a migrant. So, you know, he couldn't access whatever meager public funds exist for homeless people. But when you look at the world of the super rich buying up property in London to stash their money away, you know, that is a completely borderless world. You know, they can move money, they can move themselves, their families without any issues. But for someone in Judah's position, your migration status can literally be a matter of life or death. No, absolutely. I mean, it's also not just the kind of Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes we often hear about that are buying up homes in places like Westminster or Kensington and Chelsea.
I mean, that's an element, yeah, but we also have wealthy British billionaires using these same offshore vehicles in order to hoard housing. I mean, the largest property owner in the UK is the Duke of Westminster, and he's literally on record as having bought homes through these same offshore vehicles. Yeah, and these offshore vehicles will be located in what we call tax havens, right? So your Panamas, your Bermudas, British Virgin Islands, places like that. And from where we're standing here in London, that creates a problem. What problem does it create? It means that even though we as Londoners are being impacted by, say,
property being bought up to store wealth, it's actually very difficult for us to hold anyone accountable for that. I mean, yeah. Well, I mean, Karen Burke gave a great example. She was literally saying to me that she couldn't find out who the landlords were in a local constituency because they were registered in the Cayman Islands. But that's one thing that's crazy when you start to dig into it. They're not actually these distant, faraway places that we think of them as. The Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, they're technically part of Great Britain. I mean, we're part of Great Britain, but...
They're still part of the UK's jurisdiction. Their sovereignty still resides in Westminster. And when you talk through these places in Westminster, and we look at these houses and who owns them, why these houses aren't being brought back into the housing supply, when we start going down this trail, it makes you think, what is really the relationship between Britain and these strange places like the Cayman Islands? So basically, if you want to find out about how someone like Jula dies homeless in a place surrounded by empty homes, and you want to see who owns those empty homes and how they've been able to keep them empty, it sounds like you have to actually leave Westminster. It's become clear to me that if we want to get to the bottom of Jules' story, then we need to leave the place where he died. If we want to find out how someone can die homeless at the heart of Britain's capital city, then we need to look further afield. We need to find out more about this strange land called Offshore.
Next time on Death in Westminster. There's a building right now in the Cayman Islands that is the address for 18,000 corporations. You can escape tax laws, you can escape criminal laws. Because actually it avoids undertaking any real scrutiny in our own backyard. This is money that could and should be invested back into society. You've been listening to Death in Westminster, a podcast from Navarra Media, produced by Planet B Productions.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't miss our live event, Dark Money, How Billionaires Destroyed Britain, and How to Make Them Pay. Join us on the 19th of March at Earth in East London. The evening will be hosted by me, Dahlia Gabriel, and Kojo Karam, with special guests Peter Gagan, Stephanie Broby, Faisa Shaheen, and Hannah Spencer. Tickets are available now from Dice, and you can find the link in the show notes.