The Empty Homes Madness

As you might imagine, I speak at lots of events, and listen intently at many others, on a huge variety of issues and subjects - all interesting - but every so often a topic completely hooks me and I have to rush back to the office to wind everyone up into action.

'Empty homes' is one such topic. Our recent CIH conference on empty homes - run in partnership with the Empty Homes Agency (EHA) and chaired by its inspirational Chief Executive David Ireland - demonstrated again the complete and utter madness of this issue and why we need to get it right.

On the one hand we are adding over 200,000 extra households a year to our current total; there are 1.8 million households already on the waiting list for a social rented home; and an estimated 75,000 owners will have their homes repossessed in 2009. On the other hand levels of new house building have tumbled - with some figures showing as few as 80,000 starts in 2009.

At the same time we have nearly one million - that's 1,000,000 - empty homes in the UK at the moment. And the madness continues.

• When Parliament passed the Housing Act 2004 leading to the introduction of Empty Dwelling Management Orders in 2006, David Ireland and I found ourselves responding to media accusations that rightful inheritances were being stolen by the state (one reason perhaps why only around 20 have been used since then).
  
• In the North East there is a project that pays artists to paint pictures of curtains and ornaments on steel shutters to make it looks as though the house isn't empty.
  
• After 18 months and £250,000 the Treasury has concluded it doesn't have enough information to make a decision about removing the Council Tax discount on second homes.
  
• Admittedly, pre-Credit Crunch foreign investors saw our cities as prime places in which to invest in 'Buy-To-Leave-Empty' flats - which are still empty.
  
• And, the national indicator on empty homes has been lost in the move to the new set of 198 priorities for local authorities.

Like David and the EHA we all need to be angry about empty homes - and more importantly, to turn that anger into action. I've told David that CIH will do what we can to support him in trying to persuade the government and the HCA to develop some effective strategies - and you can help too by letting us know about successes you are having locally in dealing with empties. We already know about the imaginative approaches being developed in Rochdale (led by Darryl Lawrence) and in Leeds (through a fantastic project called Canopy), but I'm sure there is more out there. And, if you want to add to the list of things that we support EHA to campaign on, then please also get in touch. You can either respond here or email christoph.sinn@cih.org