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Perhaps the residents of Cadogan Square are just exceedingly sociable. This grand Victorian pocket of Knightsbridge has some of the country’s most sought-after addresses, but at 7.30 on a warm weekday evening very few of its tall windows are lit up.

The only light from many of the addresses is in the ground-floor hallway, the fanlights illuminated above doors through which no one seems to be coming or going. Around the corner in Lennox Place there is a stretch of six doors — about 35 apartments, judging by the buzzers — that is all dark apart from two flats. In nearby Hans Place there are seven numbers without any sign of life at all.

As the men and women who walk their dogs around here most evenings know very well, the homeowners on these strikingly dark and quiet streets won’t in fact be popping back later from supper, or at any time. The windows that are dark tonight have, by and large, been dark for months. Welcome to the ghost town of the super-rich.

When George Osborne announced in the Budget on Wednesday that properties worth more than £500,000 purchased through a company and left empty would be charged a punitive 15 per cent stamp duty, saying, “This abuse will end”, this was the nut he wanted to be seen to be cracking.

Hidden in last week’s figures showing a record drop in the number of empty homes in England was a rather startling anomaly that has far-reaching implications for housing policy, and even foreign policy. While the Government and housing campaigners welcomed reductions in long-term empty homes (unoccupied for more than six months) in London and the UK, the numbers for Kensington and Chelsea dramatically bucked the trend, with nearly 500 more, an increase of 40 per cent in the past year.

That means the royal borough — the wealthiest area in Britain — now has one of the highest empty-homes rates in the country, in 11th place if you list every local authority by its proportion of long-term unoccupied properties.

Kensington and Chelsea ranks just below decaying seaside towns such as Blackpool and above struggling northern towns like Bradford in the list, with a higher rate of empty homes than the Yorkshire town Calderdale, where one in five children lives in poverty. No other southern area comes in the top 20, and no other London borough makes the top 45.

A spokesman for the Empty Homes agency, an independent charity that campaigns on the issue, said the Kensington numbers were “extraordinary”, rightly pointing out that every other local authority near the top of the list has empty homes for very different reasons to Kensington and Chelsea.

West London’s notoriously guarded councils have always refused to tell journalists where their “darkest streets” are, but in light of last week’s figures, officials in Kensington and Chelsea’s council-tax department told the Standard that Cadogan Square is the residential spot where empty homes crop up time and again. Other empty home hotspots were more commercial streets: Sloane Street (around the corner from Cadogan Square), Old Brompton Road, King’s Road and Kensington High Street.

It may be a surprise that Kensington ranks alongside towns with some of Britain’s worst “ghost town” housing problems but it is evidence of what many who walk and cycle through west London’s wealthiest enclaves have sensed for some time now, noticing the darker windows and the quieter squares.

“Something about London has changed,” observed the New York Times in an article about how the UK’s response to Russian aggression in Ukraine is compromised by our city’s love of roubles. “The townhouses in the capital’s poshest districts are empty; they have been sold to Russian oligarchs and Qatari princes.”

You can see the author’s point. The empty-homes figures show that 1,700 Kensington houses were declared long-term empty last year for council-tax purposes, up from 1,215 in 2012 — meaning that one home in every 50 is sitting dormant. They don’t say why those homes are unoccupied but it doesn’t take a genius to guess.

The “buy to leave” phenomenon —where super-rich overseas buyers purchase prime London property with little or no intention of using it as anything other than a growing investment — has become a distinctive feature of London’s post-crash story. Estate agent Knight Frank has estimated that in South Kensington more than three-quarters of buyers from 2010 to 2013 were foreign, and two out of three in Kensington proper.

And politicians know it’s a trend that strikes a chord with voters. Under pressure, Mayor Boris Johnson recently announced a “concordat” with 50 developers, making them promise to market their wares in Britain before doing the rounds at Moscow and Beijing’s glittering property fairs, and saying that foreign owners should either live in or rent their properties, rather than treating them as “blocks of bullion in the sky”.

“You sell some of these beautiful properties to these people and then they don’t do anything with them — it’s rather disappointing,” says Patrick Bullick, managing director of high-end estate agents Stanley Chelsea and London chairman of the National Association of Estate Agents. “You can physically see the empty homes. You walk down any street in Chelsea and there are very often very few lights on.”

Bullick says west London’s ghost addresses started proliferating after the financial crash, when scrutiny of Swiss banks and other favourite havens of the super-rich was stepped up and wealthy Italians, Russians and Arabs decided to put their money elsewhere. “Those with ill-gotten gains who wished to mask things from the authorities had less motivation to put their money into Swiss bank accounts, and London property became a more attractive place,” he says. “We in London don’t really ask many questions about where the money is coming from.”

Among residents who know fewer of their neighbours and — in many cases — actually have fewer neighbours, feeling is hardening. “What has happened is that it has priced real people out of the market,” says Amanda Frame, chairman of the Kensington Society, which represents nearly 700 locals. “I used to be able to walk to get milk two blocks away — that’s gone. We are losing our local services because no one needs milk at 10 at night. They’re not here.”

She says a friend looking around the exclusive Charles House development off Kensington High Street was told by the agent giving the tour that “they would be the only person actually living there”, the rest of the buyers being non-resident purchasers, apparently from South-East Asia.

Carol Seymour-Newton of the Knightsbridge Association says the sense of community is being destroyed.When residents move out or die, she says, they are not replaced with new faces “but just an increasing number of empty homes”.

“This is people parking their money because they don’t know what else to do with it,” says Douglas & Gordon director and property pundit Ed Mead.He also suggests that some of the rise might be down to foreign buyers who used their homes occasionally until last year now declaring them empty to consider their options after the Chancellor’s measure against company-owned empty homes in the 2012 Budget. “There is talk of mansion taxes, council-tax increases and foreign-ownership taxes. Many people are just taking a step back, certainly until the election next year, to see which colour of government we get.”

The stamp duty announcement in the Budget, which took effect at midnight on Wednesday, may put off some foreign investors from leaving properties empty, but there is now a fear that one of the Government’s other measures against empty homes might be about to rebound.

Councils were given permission last year to stop offering homeowners a discount on their council tax if their property was unoccupied, incentivising occupancy and ending the ability of clever accountants to make their rich client’s properties tax “write-offs”. But applications for those discounts were the only way to reveal which homes were empty.

Paul Palmer, director of Empty Homes, says the policy “seemed like a good idea at the time” but that the issue “is going to become harder for us”.

Kensington and Chelsea told the Standard: “We have a historic list which is maintained by the council’s empty property officer, a post dedicated to bringing long-term empty properties back into gainful use, and these properties will continue to be tracked.” The council’s spokesman added: “We will also use a variety of datasets either held by the council or other organisations”, eg, Experian to work out which homes are empty.

Before they spend too much time and money, I’d suggest that an evening stroll through the deathly quiet streets around Cadogan Square would get them a long way.