In the village of St Eval, a former RAF base in Cornwall, the streets are named after aeroplanes. There is a Lancaster Crescent, a Lincoln Row, a Botha Road. The former officers’ houses are grand and generous, looking out over the village green. Other houses look west, across fields, towards the rough Cornish coastline. Spitfires once whipped down the runway, which now lies abandoned. “It’s a lovely place to live,” one resident, Trevor Windsor, told me last autumn, as he prodded at his pretty front garden. “You just hear the lawnmowers every so often, and the birds singing and the children up at the school. It’s a bucolic idyll, you might say.”

Two decades ago, this idyll was disrupted by the noisy arrival of a lorry. Residents watched on as a team of builders proceeded to knock down the walls of one of the village houses, leaving the roof intact. “They lifted up the house roof,” remembered resident Barbara Hough. “Then bricked up the walls and put the roof back on top. They did that, one house after the next, all the way up Halifax Road.”

A few months earlier, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had sold all of its military housing in St Eval to a company named Annington Homes. This was part of a much larger nationwide deal, in which Annington paid the MoD £1.67bn for 57,400 properties that housed military servicemen and their families. In one swoop, Annington became the biggest residential property owner in England and Wales.

For the MoD, the deal solved a mounting problem: tens of thousands of military homes across the country were falling apart, and the department didn’t have the budget to repair them. By selling the homes, the MoD hoped to make some quick money, while freeing up cash for renovation. After the sale, the MoD would then rent back the homes at a discounted rate.

The St Eval properties were in a bad state. Like much of the military housing that Annington acquired, these prefab units had been built during the housing shortage that followed the second world war and were initially expected to stand for no more than a decade. They had virtually no insulation. In many parts of the country, these units were afflicted with “concrete cancer”, after damp rusted away their steel frames. Some were in danger of collapsing.

Having sold off a few of the prefab houses in St Eval, Annington Homes learned that if it flattened the rest of the rotting concrete boxes and rebuilt new houses in their place, the local authority would insist the company supplied 40% affordable housing – considerably reducing its profit margin. So it came up with an ingenious solution.

Once the units on the former base were empty, Annington sent in teams of builders who would carry out the same operation, over and over. First, they would knock down the walls, securing them with temporary steel supports known as acrow props. Next, with the old roof secured in mid-air, the builders remade the walls with bricks. Once they were secure, the builders put the roof back in place, and moved on to the next house.

The process took years to complete, but by preserving the roofs, Annington avoided the expense of having to supply low-cost housing. “You’ve got a 1950s roof with a brand new house underneath,” recalled Trevor Windsor. “New kitchen, new floors, new ceilings. It was very clever – a brilliant bit of civil engineering.” (Though Hough doesn’t quite agree. She believes the process has “given the houses slightly uneven floors and doors that don’t quite fit.”)

This episode in St Eval was not the only element of the 1996 deal in which Annington ran rings around the state. In fact, it now looks representative. The full extent of the fallout from the deal – for the MoD, residents and taxpayers – is only now being understood. When Kevan Jones was minister for veterans under Gordon Brown, he called in representatives from the company, in order to try and make sense of the arrangements. “I tried to get us out of it, but it was impossible,” Jones told me. “It was an incredibly bad deal for the taxpayer. I just couldn’t believe that the former government had signed it.”

The deal signed by the MoD has become a millstone. Today, the houses that Annington bought for £1.67bn are worth £6.7bn. Under the terms of the deal, the MoD rents back thousands of houses for members of the armed forces and their families. Last year, the rental bill for 39,014 houses around the country was £167m. Of those houses for which the MoD was paying millions in rent, 7,680 were empty.

There is worse to come. The original deal gave the MoD a 58% discount on renting the houses for the first 25 years. It also allows a rent review every 25 years. The first rent review will take place in 2021 and there is nothing to stop Annington charging full market value after that point. If that happens, the MoD’s bill for accommodation for its servicemen and women will rocket and Britain’s armed forces will be faced with enormous existential questions.

The UK’s armed forces have always been an unusual employer: they require soldiers to move frequently, often from one side of the country to the other. Subsidised housing is not only a crucial part of the “offer” to recruits, living in close proximity is also critical for maintaining morale and monitoring soldiers who have recently returned from long tours of duty. According to one senior MoD source, the prospect of the rent rise in four years’ time is referred to internally as “the cliff edge”. “It will very profoundly affect every aspect of the army’s operations,” the MoD source told me.

There were many privatisations in the 80s and 90s, where national assets were snapped up by the private sector. The sale of Britain’s military housing was just one of those deals. The result is that today, thousands of former army houses are managed by a company run from one of the smartest streets in London, and owned by a private equity fund based in Guernsey. In turn, that private equity fund manages billions of pounds for some of the biggest investors in the world, who have made a fortune out of Annington. The taxpayer, meanwhile, has lost billions.

The man behind the Annington deal was Guy Hands. Today, Hands is one of Britain’s richest men, but back in the mid-1990s, he was just beginning to make a name for himself. He grew up near Sevenoaks in Kent, establishing himself as a deal-maker from an early age, making money by selling trinkets, artworks and encyclopaedias. “While other children played with toy soldiers or learned the piano I spoke to my great-uncle about the stock market and traded cigarette cards, stamps and coins,” he said in a 2012 speech at Harvard Business School.

Hands arrived at Oxford University to study PPE in 1978, but ended up spending most of his time on business rather than studying. He bought a derelict house that needed total renovation; he bought a launderette, which he turned into an art gallery. He also became close friends with the future foreign secretary, William Hague. He left Oxford with a third-class degree.

‘Today, Guy Hands is one of Britain’s richest men.’ Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In 1982, he began working as a bond trader at the US bank Goldman Sachs in London and before long he was one of the stars of the trading team. Over time, however, Hands grew frustrated with what he saw as the bank’s conservative approach to investment and began to look for opportunities elsewhere. In 1994, the London office of the Japanese bank Nomura tempted Hands away, promising him free rein to invest in any asset he wanted.

Hands arrived for his first day at his new job in December, as head of Nomura’s securitisation and structured finance teams. “We walked in on a Monday morning, and he was in one of those glass offices everyone can see into,” remembered a financier who worked under Hands. “He said he wanted to meet everybody in the team.” The first member of the team who went in to meet Hands was sacked on the spot. It was the start of a cull that continued for months. “After two years, we decided to have an alumni reunion,” the financier recalled. “And we had 200 people we could have invited. Those were the people who had been and gone.”

By eliminating anyone who didn’t come up to his standards, Hands surrounded himself with an equally hard-headed team. “He used a combination of authority and threat and encouragement,” remembered the financier. The new team was named the Principal Finance Group (PFG) because it was investing Nomura’s own money, or principal. Hands, who is dyslexic, misspelled “principal” at first, sparking jokes over how principled PFG would be. (Hands declined numerous requests to be interviewed for this article. Instead, one of his advisers emailed me a speech discussing Annington that Hands had delivered shortly after his private equity group became aware that the Guardian was researching Annington.)

Hands and his new team wasted no time. In their first major deal, they targeted the British Rail trains that were being sold off as part of the privatisation of the railways. Putting its bid together, PFG applied the clinical level of research that would become its trademark.

The trains were split into three groups, each owned and maintained by a separate rolling stock operating company. The critical element of the bid was to establish how much each of these companies was worth. According to the financier, over a two-week period, one of Nomura’s researchers rang or visited every single train manufacturer in the world. He soon figured out that Angel Trains, one of the three rolling stock operating companies, was seriously undervalued. Its trains were being sold with a projected use of seven years, when in fact they would almost certainly be used for significantly longer because there was insufficient manufacturing capacity worldwide to replace the trains. Instead of valuing the deal on a seven-year projection, PFG valued it on a longer timeline. PFG could easily outbid competitors, while still being confident that they would make money on the deal. “Surprise, surprise, we won,” said the financier. “And some of those trains are still running today.”

In January 1996, a little more than a year after Hands had arrived at Nomura, PFG paid £696m for Angel Trains. It was only after the sale that the key element of the deal became clear. After buying Angel Trains, the Nomura consortium securitised the debt through a bond issue of £690m. This meant that within weeks of buying the trains, PFG had sold the rights to the Angel Trains income for £690m, but retained ownership of the asset. In December 1997 – less than two years after they had bought Angel – Nomura sold it on. RBS bought the business for £395m. PFG had made almost £400m in less than two years.

The deal boosted PFG’s confidence. Hands’s team was hungry and ambitious, and its members knew that their careers depended on hunting down the next deal. “It was – I hate to say it – last days of the Roman empire,” said a second member of the team. “It was very young people given a degree of autonomy and responsibility which you would never normally get, and given the opportunity to make something out of it, and everybody did. Everybody worked like crazy.”

One of PFG’s strongest assets was the handful of maths postgraduates who built the complicated financial models that Nomura needed for its private equity deals. One of Hands’s former colleagues remembers a Saturday afternoon in the office when the “cyber room”, as the mathematicians were known, were grumbling that Nomura’s computers were not powerful enough for their needs. From his home in Sevenoaks, Hands ordered his team to fix the problem that day. “We went in a taxi to Tottenham Court Road and bought four of the biggest computers that you could buy at the time,” remembered the financier. “We did a deal with the guy at the computer shop, and he threw in four copies of Age of Empires. It took about eight hours to wire it all together, and then it was battle royale on the computers. To this day, Age of Empires reminds me of Principal Finance.”

PFG were always on the lookout for any badly run, undervalued business that it could rapidly fix up and sell on. Hands once described his ideal target as being “the worst business we can find in the most challenged sector”. When the MoD announced that it was planning to offload thousands of run-down properties all over England and Wales, it seemed like the perfect deal.

Hands moved fast. After the Angel Trains deal, he could now be confident that if he bought the military housing, he would be able to almost simultaneously borrow hundreds of millions to cover the purchase price. He could then cover the costs of borrowing by renting back the housing to the MoD. According to his team’s projections, the underlying value of the properties would gradually appreciate, and once the rights to the rental income were sold, the debt would be off Nomura’s balance sheet, and they could move on to the next deal. “Nowadays, what we did is absolutely standard, it’s what private equity does,” said the second Nomura banker. “At the time, that was regarded as groundbreaking.”

PFG approached the project as though it was going into battle. “We were the barbarians at the gate,” said the financier. Individuals were assigned to every different element of the deal and thousands of man hours were spent calculating the value of the houses. “We’re talking about buying 57,000 houses in variable condition,” said the financier. “How do you factor in the combination of what is going to happen to the property market in terms of valuations? How are we going to refurbish them? How are we going to sell the ones we need to sell? All of those components we looked at, and then broke them down individually, and then we worked out what the value of each of those components was, added it all up and then stuck our finger in the air and said, ‘We’ll bid this much.’”

NatWest bank, which managed the sale of the housing for the MoD, predicted a total selling price of £1bn. In an independent valuation, the estate agent Savills had put a pricetag of £1.5bn on the estate. Astonishingly, according to a speech Hands gave at a property conference in London last year, the MoD had originally estimated the sites were worth only £400m.

In the first round of bidding, at the beginning of 1996, there were roughly 60 prospective buyers. In the second round, the list was whittled down to 19. According to Hands, Warren Buffett and Lehman Brothers were two of Nomura’s main competitors.

Everyone connected to the deal remembers Hands driving the process. “Guy played game theory on the bid all of the time,” said the second member of the PFG team. “He was constantly on to the vendors, trying to work out where he stood, what they wanted, what he needed to do.”

The contrast between PFG and the civil servants who handled the deal could not have been starker. While Hands’s team worked relentlessly, often through the night, making complex models on state of the art computers, the Ministry of Defence’s documents on the sale of the military housing reveal a very different approach. Internal memos have a chatty tone, and mistakes were corrected by hand. When the former chief of defence staff Lord Bramall’s name was misspelled, a superfluous letter was carefully crossed out. “This bidder appears to have taken leave of its senses,” states one letter. “D is the clear winner and A a non-starter.” Notes were added in the margins. “I’m sure that [illegible] will want to discuss with you after his meeting – it’ll probably have to be on the carphone as you go to the constituency,” runs one note from an official to the then defence secretary Michael Portillo.

When it became apparent that veterans and soldiers’ groups disliked the prospect of a Japanese bank profiting from British military homes, Nomura recruited Sir Thomas Macpherson, a second world war hero with three Military Crosses, as chairman. The former air vice marshal Alexander Hunter was brought in as deputy chairman. Nomura also agreed to set up the Annington Trust, a charitable foundation which gives grants to help develop creches and youth clubs for service families. The trust was given start-up capital of £430,000 – or 0.026% of what Nomura would eventually pay for the 57,400 MoD properties.

By August 1996, the shortlist was down to four bidders. According to a letter circulated to senior Ministry of Defence officials setting out these four remaining bids, Nomura was a “clear winner” at that point. One group, understood to be the Nomura consortium, “in particular mentioned that they are working on how to present their consortium with as British a face as possible”. In a scribble in the margins to Portillo, one of his aides stated, “it all looks pretty clear cut”.

By September, the deal was done. Nomura agreed to pay £1.67bn for the houses. According to a spokesperson from Annington, the terms of the contract were set by the MoD and the company had no “ability to influence or negotiate the terms of the agreements”. The MoD would get some money back on some of the houses sold off over the first 15 years. The Ministry of Defence considered the sale a triumph. In a letter to John Major, who was then prime minister, a senior official noted: “The final negotiations have been intensive, but fairly conducted.” Another minister was described as “delighted that the sale had been concluded”.

No one at Nomura ever seemed in any doubt that it would win. Nomura’s lawyers had set up the Annington Homes shell company at the end of July 1996, when the MoD was still debating how to manage the sale. Hands became a director of the company in August, and Annington Homes completed the purchase of the homes on 5 November 1996.

The barbarians were inside the walls.

Hands now admits that the early months of 1997 were a mess. At the time of the Annington deal, the MoD knew that it was going to reduce the number of servicemen and women over the coming decades. The agreement stated that when military accommodation was no longer required for rental by the armed forces, Annington could do whatever it wanted with the properties.

In the first year after the deal was signed, the MoD released 2,000 of the 57,400 houses. Annington renovated these properties with the aim of selling them on to affluent buyers, but to their consternation they found that they couldn’t shift the houses. Four Annington Homes chief executives quit in just over 18 months. Finally, James Hopkins, a former army man, was brought in as chief executive to rescue the flailing company, which had accumulated huge debts to buy the MoD housing in the first place.

Prospective buyers camp at RAF Coltishall in Norfolk, awaiting the sale of former MoD properties, 2007. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA Archive/PA Images

Hopkins came up with a new approach. Instead of spending more on renovating houses and trying to target the luxury market, Annington would focus on first-time buyers and public sector workers. They would offer the homes with 5% of the purchase price paid by the company as a deposit to the mortgage provider. They would make the lack of renovation a selling point, telling purchasers they were buying a blank canvas.

The houses would be sold off at a set price, on a first-come, first-served basis. Soon people were lining up to buy Annington Homes. In the summer of 1999, prospective buyers in Huntingdon camped out for 17 days to buy houses on a former RAF estate. The following April, families camped for over a week to buy married quarters in South Wigston, on the outskirts of Leicester. In February 2001, they camped in Devizes in Wiltshire. Hopkins’s strategy was working perfectly.

Not everyone was delighted by Annington’s new “pile ’em high” sales strategy. By 2002, CPO Bob Beeching and his wife had been living in their Portsmouth house for 10 years. Making a home for their four children, the couple had decorated the house with buttercup-painted walls and new carpets. When Annington announced that the house would be sold because the MoD no longer needed the site, Beeching organised a mortgage, and asked if he could buy the house. Annington turned him down. Under the terms of its contract with the MoD, the houses had to be returned to their original state before being sold.

“Annington told us that we would have to queue in a field for three weeks in February, and they would not be able to guarantee that we got any house on the road in particular,” said Beeching. “And we would have to return the house to exactly how we got it first, ripping out all the carpet and painting it all magnolia again.

“The service families were a proper community, all the kids knew each other and had been friends for years. We all just asked Annington if we could buy the houses we lived in, rather than take pot luck. It wouldn’t have made any difference to anyone and they would have got exactly the same amount of money. They said ‘no’. It was very frustrating and upsetting for everyone.” (A spokesman for Annington told the Guardian that it was the MoD that had insisted that everyone should have the opportunity to buy any house, which meant that everyone had to leave the houses before they were sold.)

In its early years, Annington promoted the idea that house sales would be targeted at serving or current members of the armed forces, taking out adverts in forces’ publications. But house prices quickly rose out of the reach of services salaries. As Annington’s website points out, in clinical language, the sales to armed forces personnel are “reducing steadily due to changes in the accessibility of the United Kingdom residential property market”.

Over the past two decades, Annington has sold off almost 20,000 houses that the MoD has stopped using, but the company is developing a new strategy. Last autumn, I met a senior Annington manager in the company’s head office, just off Oxford Street in central London. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said Annington was shifting towards the private rental sector.

Among major property developers, the build-to-rent market is growing rapidly, as demand for rental accommodation continues to rise. Annington has an advantage over its competitors in that it doesn’t need to build to rent – it already has tens of thousands of houses available. Senior executives at Annington now believe that it makes more sense to lease out the houses forever, rather than sell them. Sitting in his office, the senior manager looked wistful as he thought of all the houses the company sold off piecemeal to private individuals before identifying the new trend. He made it clear that Annington is not going to make that mistake again.

The first indication of this new strategy came last year. In 2014, Howe Barracks, on the eastern outskirts of Canterbury, was closed after being home to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders regiment for 10 years. In 2016, Annington put the 147 houses of what was Howe Barracks up for auction. This time, however, rather than selling the houses as it had before, it was selling only short leases of 25 years on the properties.

Canterbury city council saw the properties on Howe Barracks as a way of reducing its long waiting list for social housing, and put in a bid. But Canterbury underestimated the desperation of London councils, frantic to reduce their own waiting lists by accessing cheaper housing outside the capital. A bidding war ensued, handled by Annington. Canterbury was easily outbid by Redbridge council, in east London, 63 miles away. There were protests at Howe Barracks when locals realised that the houses would go to Redbridge residents. One far-right group describing themselves as “angry, white and proud” hung St George flags from the perimeter fence. But Simon Cook, the leader of Canterbury city council, told me it simply could not compete with Redbridge’s bid.

Last summer, families from east London started arriving on Howe Barracks. It is fair to say this might not have been what they were hoping for when they applied for social housing. Not only are they 63 miles away from Redbridge, the Howe Barracks site is not well suited to the needs of the new arrivals. Because Redbridge is moving the largest families on its waiting lists, there are far more children than there were when army families filled the houses, so the local schools are under more pressure. The playgrounds around the estate were all taken out before the families began moving in, because they were deemed unnecessary and expensive. Last autumn, I spoke to Fatuhani Ahmed, one of those who had been moved to this patch of Kent from Redbridge. From Mali originally, Ahmed settled in east London, close to family and friends, and now finds herself completely isolated on the outskirts of Canterbury. “In London, we looked after each other,” she told me. “If I needed, my sister could look after my son as a favour. My auntie was there too.” Ahmed is separated from her partner and says that her son and his father are now only able to see each other “occasionally”.

The Howe Barracks case encapsulates the short-sightedness of the 1996 deal. In short, state entities used state funds to bid against each other for blocks of properties that were owned by the state just a generation ago. This auction was, of course, presided over by Annington, who held all the cards. As the housing crisis continues to worsen, this kind of situation is likely to become more and more common.

The MoD now recognises that the Annington deal was a catastrophic mistake. Lord West, who became first sea lord six years after the deal had been signed off, says the deal had caused “major problems” and that the armed forces had failed to understand the long-term consequences. “People thought, ‘Oh, aren’t we clever?’ but I don’t think it was thought through,” he told me.

The implications still appear to be sinking in. First, there is the long-term capital loss, as the value of property in the UK keeps rising. Second, the MoD’s rental costs are rising: from £2,575 per house in 1997 to £4,865 in 2016. Third, according to the contract, the houses must be returned in a decent condition. This means that when the MoD hands back unused houses to Annington, they have to pay “dilapidations” to ensure properties are in an acceptable state for Annington to sell them. The average dilapidations payment was £21,809 per property last year. Last year, 248 houses were handed over to Annington.

A post office and shopping complex at the St Eval former airbase, Cornwall. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

On at least one occasion, the MoD has even had to buy land straight back from Annington for more housing. From 2001, the MoD had handed over various parcels of land at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Annington secured planning consent to redevelop the land for private housing, before the MoD decided that it wanted to buy some of it back. In 2014, the MoD paid Annington more than £28m to buy back a site at Brize Norton that included 194 houses. This means the MoD has paid about £145,000 per house for properties sold off for an average of £28,000 in the original 1996 deal.

It isn’t just Guy Hands and PFG that did well out of the deal. His investors, too, made vast profits. As Hands explained in his property conference speech last year, he made a slight miscalculation at the outset. “We had done something in 1996 and 1997, which made sense at the time, but in hindsight was not the best decision,” said Hands. “We had securitised Annington’s rental payments at a cost of 7.54% through to 2021.” In other words, Hands had locked in the “mortgage” on the Annington houses at a very high rate. He was then stuck making the higher payments for years. This stabilised the deal – Hands knew that the rental would cover the debt costs – and took the deal off Nomura’s balance sheet.

This had another consequence: the high borrowing costs meant that all the hundreds of millions paid in rent by the MoD in the last two decades has washed straight offshore, endlessly servicing debt. Annington’s investors – the biggest winners in the deal – have made the largest profits. And because all the rental income floods offshore, Annington has never made an operating profit in the UK. Despite receiving £168m in rent from the MoD last year, Annington didn’t pay a penny of corporation tax.

There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Hands’s team in the purchase of the army housing. They were simply far more effective than their competitors and outsmarted a government department that wasn’t equipped to keep up with their financial sophistication. A spokesman for Annington Homes told me: “In 1996 Annington won a competitive auction to acquire 57,400 homes from the Ministry of Defence. These homes were leased back to the MoD on a 200-year lease at a heavily discounted rate, equivalent to a 58% discount compared to open market value for the first 25 years. This discount has saved the MoD a cumulative sum of [around] £3.7bn in open-market values over the period of the contract to date.”

For the MoD, however, the phrase “for the first 25 years” is a reminder of what may be the most alarming consequence of the deal. If, in four years’ time, Annington raises the rent on military housing to market rates, the MoD will find itself in a perilous situation. “It was a very poor decision in the first place, with a very short-term gain,” said Nia Griffith, the shadow defence secretary. “And that is a real difficulty, because there is a 25-year initial lease period, which is up in 2021, and then the lease will have to be renegotiated, and they’ve got a monopoly. It is very difficult to negotiate when you don’t have any other options.”

The army is scrambling to find a solution to this looming housing problem. In a recent survey of 8,322 people by the Army Families Federation (AFF), 30% of respondents said they would definitely leave the army if access to service family accommodation was reduced, and a further 46% said that they would consider leaving. The AFF noted that this accommodation creates a “support network [that] is nearly impossible to replicate”, and that the benefits of this model, “such as security, empathy and practical support, are not yet properly understood or quantified”.

For Sir Bob Russell, the former Liberal Democrat MP who battled against the Annington deal for years, the rent rise is “a scandal on top of a scandal.” He says: “If anyone at Annington had a shred of decency, they would see that this is an outrage.” For Russell, the years that he spent representing Colchester and its military residents made the deal particularly egregious. “I was fighting for the soldiers’ housing to be improved, because so much of it was terrible, and every time you made some progress, you were just putting more money in Annington’s pocket. The whole thing was just a disgrace. They made back every penny within 10 years, and they’ve been left with a huge income from the MoD and thousands of houses.”

In 2012, Hands moved Annington out of Nomura and into Terra Firma, the private equity vehicle he now manages. Investors in Terra Firma include hedge funds, private family trusts and sovereign wealth funds. Thanks to regular income from the MoD, Annington’s value rises every year. Yet despite the ongoing success of the Annington deal, over the past decade Hands has made a number of missteps, losing hundreds of millions of pounds from his investments in the music group EMI and the troubled care home group Four Seasons.

Back in St Eval, residents such as Phil Hartley, a 36-year-old taxi driver, remain bewildered by the deal. If the houses had to be sold off by the MoD in the first place, Hartley doesn’t understand why they could not have been sold directly to families. Cornwall has been facing a housing crisis for years, with holiday homes pricing out local residents. Buying one of the St Eval houses at the price Annington paid, Hartley says, would have been “transformational” for his family. Instead, Annington took its cut before selling many of the houses on to buy-to-let investors, who also take their slice. (A spokesman for Annington said the company took “a commercial decision to fully refurbish the properties, in the process creating a good supply of affordably priced housing for sale in the local community” and that the houses were often sold to first-time buyers.)

Hartley knows he will never be able to afford a house in the area and currently rents one of the houses that was jacked and bricked. “It makes me really angry to think that the MoD sold off the houses to investors rather than families,” he told me. He looked across at the neat little houses, tidy against the green fields: “It would have made such a difference to people.”

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