The recent amalgamation of the Association of Land and Property Owners (ALPO), the National Federation of Property Owners (NFPO) and the Property Owners Protection Association (POPA). , into a single new body -the National Association of Property Owners (NAPO)- is one of the most alarming moves to have been made recently in the property world.
ALlU was already a very strong pressure group for vested property interest: its council included such men as Nigel Broackes of Trafalgar House Investments, Louis Freedman of Ravenscroft Properties, D. S. Nixon of City of London Real Property, B. Stewart-Deane of the Freshwater Group-the biggest residential property owners, apart from the Government.
These men, their colleagues, and the companies they represent, constitute some of the most influential and powerful forces at work in the property world today.
Broackes, for example, was perhaps the only man apart from Harry Hyams to become a multi-millionaire through property in the years 959-68. After losing most of a £25,000 inheri tance dabbling in hire-purchase and offhand development of Chelsea mews premises, he turned to his subject with a vengeance, and became one of the Third Schedule fiddlers-his company, in which he has a very large personal holding, is now worth at least £38.6m. in asset value The Third Schedule loophole was a device much exploited by developers in the late fifties and early sixties: it revolves around an error in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which laid down that developers could enlarge office buildings "up to 10% of their cubic content", without becoming eligible for any form of development charge. By putting in curtain walls in place of thick Victorian bricks, reducing the height of each storey by up to half, and primarily by squaring the premises up into an economic cube, the developer could provide five times as much floor space as was available on the old site, and charge many times the rent per square foot for modern accommodation without having to pay any development charge - as long, of course, as its "cubic content" was not more than 10% more than the old building.
¡ypical or me nira scneawe deveropment is the New Scotland Yard building in Queen Victoria Street, which replaces three Victorian buildings, and, with a total office space of 400,000 square feet, has a ratio of site to floor space of 7:1 compared with the maximum allowed by the LCC for this area of 3.5:1. The reason the fuzz's developers, Westminster Trust, were able to cheat and defy these restrictions was because in 1954 the Conservative Government had introduced an act which required local governments to compensate developers for the full hypothetical value of his development + profit, when refusing planning permission.
To put it in the simplest terms, the LOC had not got enough bread to stop the fuzz doing what they wanted. The developers not only went, unstopped, against prevailing rules of local government in the area, but, by invoking that Third Schedule anomaly, escaped all development charge. That's police and property for you!
Anyway, Broackes is one of many of the multi-millionaire bosses of the National Association of Property Owners (NAPO), which, from January onwards, replaces ALPO, NFPO and POPA. The combination of the three makes the group a formidable force to contend with The former Chairman of ALPO, Mr. Gordoi Dashwood, who is Managing Director of London County Freehold, a big property company, becomes Chairman of the new amalgamation of property owners' societies. Gordon Dashwood, writing in The Property Journal, organ of the new society, mused over the past achievements of ALPO. "ALPO ... has sought to provide wise council to those who govern, "he says. "Sometimes it has prevailed, other times blinding prejudice has denied the sane course."
Anyone with any ability to read between Dashwood's lines will know what he means: ALPO was an effective pressure group, though not as effective as he would have liked it to have been. It did, for example, force Parliament to change Section 33 of the Leasehold Reform Act, which prevented inordinate profit from the sale of flats.
It has, however, more ambitious projects or hand, including an immediate return to a free market in rents-which means a free-for-all in which Rachmanism will be even more common than it is today.
With the added force of the members and influence of NFPO and POPA, it now represents a very dire threat indeed.
It is this kind of organisation which should be persistently subjected to the closest conceivable scrutiny. NAPO members are, for example. already talking jubilantly about what they will do when the Conservative Government gets back to power. With the abolition of the Land Commission, the raising of the Office Development Ban, the lowering of Capital Gains Tax and Betterment Levy all very much much on the cards; their power and potential will be proportionately increased, and they may very well get their way with home rentals. They must be