The council tenants making a killing

It is the council home that became a goldmine.

Only weeks after buying it from their council, its tenants sold it on, and walked away with a £94,000 profit.

The couple, Arberore and Petrit Riza, were able to purchase the flat in Bloomsbury at a knock-down rate under the right to buy scheme.

Eight weeks later, they had earned a 57 per cent return on their £165,000 investment. Though they had done nothing illegal, it has been described as one of the worst abuses of the system.

It comes as pressure grows on the Government to overhaul right-to-buy, which has seen 236,521 homes sold off in London since the scheme was introduced in 1980.

Nationwide, nearly 1.5 million homes have been lost - half of which have not been replaced as social housing. At the same time, the number of homeless families has rocketed from under 5,000 to 81,250, three quarters of whom live in London.

With an average house in Greater London now costing 8.6 times a nurse's salary, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott announced plans in June to build 90,000 homes in the South-East for key workers.

According to the homeless charity Shelter, nearly £4.5billion has been given to tenants as discounts on the purchase of their council homes - more than the Government has spent subsidising the building of new housing association properties.

Ben Jackson, Shelter's director of external affairs, said: "The right to buy as it stands is a catastrophic waste of taxpayers' money. It is exacerbating a chronic shortage of affordable homes."

Camden council, which sold the flat in Tonbridge Street to the Rizas, carried out a survey into its right-to-buy sales. Of 71 properties it investigated, nearly half had been resold or sub-let.

One property in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, was bought for £60,000 and then sold for £400,000; a home in Retcar Place, Highgate was bought for £21,000 and resold for £155,500.

Camden says it has lost one quarter of its housing stock because of righttobuy. Last year it sold 761 properties, while providing only 182 new homes in partnership with housing associations.

The Rizas were given their council home in 1997 after fleeing Serbian persecution in Kosovo two years earlier. They qualified for the right-tobuy scheme in 1999 after two years as secure tenants, selling it in February last year for £297,000.

However, because they sold it less than two months later rather than retaining it for at least two years, the Rizas, who have two children, had to hand back their £38,000 discount - but still made a profit of £94,000. Mrs Riza, 32, a student at Middlesex University, refused to discuss the flat when contacted by the Evening Standard.

A council spokeswoman said: "Our feelings are exactly the same, whether it's asylum seekers or English nationals who have lived there all their lives. There does seem to be an injustice in the right-to-buy system."