Abode Recruitment

As housing waiting lists grow and social house building grinds to a halt, hundreds of thousands of homes like these lie empty. Inside Housing this week launches its Empty Promise campaign to fill the UK’s voids. Caroline Thorpe reports.

There are more than 30,000 families waiting for housing in Leeds; but at the same time the council says 17,741 homes in the city lie empty. Liverpool has around 12,000 empty homes, with 12,886 households on its waiting list. Newcastle: 5,254 empty homes, 9,165 on the waiting list. You do the math.

It’s a recurring pattern nationwide – and a recurring nightmare for those affected. For those enduring an already painful wait for a home, knowing thousands of homes stand unoccupied is the final insult.

The scandal of the UK’s empty homes – there are 943,414 of them according to the Empty Homes Agency – is sadly not new. Since the turn of the millennium the official number has failed to dip below 650,000.

And it smarts now more than ever. Recession exacerbates the problem, as repossessed households ramp up demand for already oversubscribed social housing – ironically leaving empty homes in their wake – and brand new housing developments fail to sell.

It’s not just those needing a home who suffer. The nation’s thousands of unoccupied properties blight the lives of those living nearby, scarring neighbourhoods, inviting anti-social behaviour and sapping community spirit.

For a vivid encounter with the adverse effects of vacant properties, you only need visit the new website reportemptyhomes.com, where details of empty homes entered by the public are instantly transmitted to the relevant council in the hope something will be done about them. ‘The house [is] empty and not boarded up,’ writes a Liverpool resident. ‘All the windows have been smashed, the front door has been smeared in paint. The front and back gardens are full of rubbish which is attracting rats and flies.’

Vermin are also causing problems around a long-term empty in Horsham: ‘This house is now causing rats to come into the area. It’s falling apart, and [the] garden is overgrowing all its fences.’ In Waveney in Suffolk, a new development is worrying locals, according to this report: ‘A pair of semi-detached houses were built over one year ago and have never been occupied.’

Of course it’s the councils and housing providers which are left to tackle the consequences. Which is why it’s time they had more help (see our campaign demands, overleaf ). Especially as the problem looks set to worsen.