Officers from Brent Council have uncovered 31 immigrants living in a four-bedroom house including a woman who was using a wooden shack in the garden as her home.
The discovery at the rundown property in Napier Road, Wembley, shows the shocking conditions desperate tenants will tolerate to ensure they have a roof over their head.
The owner of the house was pocketing around £80,000 a year in rent after illegally converting the property into nine bedrooms.
He now faces being hauled before the courts.
Photographs taken by the council’s enforcement team depicts the overcrowded and insanitary condition of the property with bunk beds crammed into small bedrooms and a gaping hole in the roof.
The ‘shanty town’ style wooden shack where the sole woman in the property lived was from wood offcuts, pallets and tarpaulins.
It was also unlit and unheated.
Cllr Harbi Farah, Brent Council’s lead member for housing said: “We’ve seen pest-ridden slums and even beds in sheds before, but this is a new low. The shack looks like something you would expect to see in a Hollywood depiction of a shanty town, not Zone 4 of London. Criminal landlords cannot and will not get away with this.
“Our ground-breaking licensing scheme is helping us to tackle poor standards in the private rented sector and focus on the minority of unscrupulous landlords who refuse to comply with the law.
“The people who pay the heaviest price in the worst rogue landlord cases are their tenants, who pay over the odds for substandard accommodation and live in cramped, hazardous conditions.
“We will prosecute any landlord or agent we find treating their tenants in such a despicable way.”
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