A cancer-suffering Peckham man says Southwark Council is denying his grandmother’s dying wish to give him her council home.
George Riccardi, 32, of the Southampton Way Estate, says Southwark Council is trying to repossess the home he’s lived in for over a decade.
He claims his grandmother, who is “dying” from Alzheimer’s, gave permission to assign the tenancy to him four years ago – before her mental health rapidly deteriorated.
Southwark Council is expected to claim he missed several appointments to discuss his housing situation – and that the property is not rightfully his.
George, who was diagnosed with testicular cancer last November, said it felt like “the world is against him”.
The Southampton Way Tenants’ and Residents’ Association (TRA) Chair said: “It feels like the world is against me. For one, I’ve got cancer.
“Also, for thirty years my grandmother has lived in this council flat. Since 2012, it’s been my home and now I’m being evicted.
“I have all the relevant documentation which states I am legally entitled to be living in my home,” he claimed.
“It was not me who breached the tenure but Southwark themselves.”
George says he moved in with his grandmother in 2012 and, five years later, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
From then until 2021, he says he cared for her: “I’ve been through years of watching my grandmother slowly die and fade away.
“It got to a point where I couldn’t cope with watching her disappear – her getting lost for hours and police bringing her back, changing her nappies – I just couldn’t cope.”
The family made the decision to move his grandmother to a care home in March 2021 – but not before she approved a document assigning the tenancy to her grandson, George says.
He says, that in 2019, his grandmother signed a handwritten document stating her wish to sign the tenancy over to him.
According to Southwark’s Tenants’ Handbook, tenants can sometimes assign their tenancies to a relative if they have lived together for a period of time.
By November 2021, George claims to have sent “all the relevant documentation” to Southwark Council.
But in November 2022, he received an email from the council saying he’d missed multiple appointments to discuss his housing situation and that, due to non-cooperation, they’d see him in court.
Compounding his misery, George was diagnosed with testicular cancer in November 2022 and fears the disease has spread elsewhere in his body.
He said, following a conversation with a doctor: “I turned around to see somebody wearing a green Macmillan uniform – your whole world just falls away.”
George says he never received any of the letters inviting him to appointments with the council. He believes they were sent to his mother’s address.
He added that, as TRA vice-chair and later chair, a Southwark Council staff member who was aware of the situation had ample opportunity to alert him to the looming disaster.
He said: “I was liaising with the [council staff member] the entire time – sometimes twice a month – and not at any one point did she ever mention she needed to speak to me privately or anything about a letter she had sent me, let alone the six letters it is alleged that she had sent to me.”
“[They] had ample opportunity to also phone me as well email me and did nothing of the sort.”
Southwark Council was approached for comment but said it could not comment on active legal proceedings.