Lotto winner and the bed in his shed

The house two miles from one of Britains leading independent schools was raided by council officials with police and firemen in tow at the end of last year and a demolition notice has since been served on its owner. The local authority is clamping down on an epidemic spreading across the South East, where housing is at a premium.

With the lifting of restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians moving to the UK on Jan 1 and figures showing a net increase in migration to the UK of 212,000 in the year to September 2013, the problem of beds in sheds is likely to get much worse.

A thermal image shows the shed

Officials in Harrow authorised an aircraft to fly over the borough to hunt for illegally occupied outbuildings. At a height of 3,400ft, the plane spent more than three hours filming the streets below from 9pm to just after midnight on Jan 8.

After studying the photographic evidence, officials concluded that the beds-in-sheds problem was far worse than they had suspected. Previously, Harrow had identified 75 suspected illegal dwellings in gardens as a result of tip-offs from irate neighbours. But the evidence from the spy plane indicated that there were 319 suspect constructions, which could mean a secret community of more than 1,000 people.

The telltale signs, picked up on a thermal-imaging camera, were the yellow blobs of heat escaping from uninsulated roofs, or the large outline of a building that should not have been where it was.

When Slough, in Berkshire, carried out a similar exercise in 2013, it found 210 outbuildings suspected of illegally housing migrants. Some reports have suggested that as many as 6,000 suspected sheds with beds exist in Slough alone. Ealing in west London has a problem on a similar scale.

The bed in the shed dwelling at Courtenay Avenue shows up as a large black rectangle on the aerial photograph. From the busy road that runs past the house, it is invisible.

The beds-in-sheds phenomenon means there is a hidden community springing up in the back gardens of our cities in our borough alone the thermal pictures we receive suggest there are four times as many as we first suspected, said Cllr Susan Hall, the Conservative leader of Harrow council.

The pressures of migration in London, fuelled by recent waves of new arrivals from eastern Europe, are creating new stresses on local authorities that we just havent had to contend with before.

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Lotto winner and the bed in his shed