On July 1 Iain Wright, the Under-Secretary of State at Communities and Local Government, announced that the number of empty homes in England had risen to 762,635, the highest level for nine years. Next week is the national week of action on empty homes. The Empty Homes Agency is focusing on public pressure and has launched a new website, reportemptyhomes.com, that will allow anyone to report an empty property, such as the one in Greenwich, southeast London, pictured. It will then inform the relevant local authority, helping councils to identify empty homes and bringing pressure on them to take action.

So why, after years of the numbers of empty homes falling, are the figures rising again? David Ireland, the head of the agency, believes that they started to grow in tandem with the oversupply of new-build citycentre flats. For the first time the majority of buyers were not owneroccupiers but investors, buying to make a profit rather than a home.

“An inevitable consequence was that the link between new supply and housing demand was broken,” Ireland says. “Investors continued to buy up these properties past the saturation point of potential occupiers, the result being a large surplus of vacant flats.” He attributes further problems to the economic crisis.

In recent years smaller developers have been the driving force behind reducing the number of empty homes. They bought up and redeveloped vacant properties, but as the downturn has taken hold many of these smaller businesses have stopped developing. This means that properties that fall empty now stay empty.

“Finally, call it bad timing or bad luck, but we have to add stalled regeneration projects,” Ireland adds.

He explained that homes have been vacated to make way for future regeneration projects that are reliant on private investment - but now those developments have been put on hold because of the economic climate. So what can be done to avoid the increase in empty homes? Ireland thinks that stop-gap housing could be an answer: “The properties could provide short-term housing for young people on low incomes who either do not qualify for social housing or cannot afford private rents in the area.” He acknowledges that some of the homes, particularly the larger estates, have been left empty for too long and are beyond repair.

“But if we can get hold of the empty properties early on and make them liveable it would mean that not only would they continue to be occupied but they would also be protected from further vandalism while the owners decide on the properties' future.”

For more information, go to: www.emptyhomes.com

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