This week is Empty Homes Week 2023, a week dedicated to highlighting the need to bring back empty properties into use.
Both Brent and Camden Councils have been tweeting about privately owned properties that they have helped to bring back into use. Brent and Camden sample tweets.
Their communication concentrates on bringing back empty privately owned properties into use. But what about Council owned properties?
Sadly there are a number of Council owned housing units that are vacant at the end of each financial year as reported to the Government.
See table below:
The data above clearly shows that both Councils have a significant number of long term empty Council Homes. Should more emphasis be put into bringing those properties back into use? We constantly hear about their new homes building programmes but very rarely hear about what they are doing to bring back properties they own into use.
source https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/local-authority-housing-statistics-data-returns-for-2020-to-2021, and similar worksheets for other years.