National Empty Homes Week

As frequent readers have no doubt noticed, I’m generally inspired to write by current affairs taking place in Crawley or nationally, new data releases and what the figures suggest about our town, or key festivals and other scheduled events. One such event kicks off today, which is what I’d like to write about today: National Empty Homes Week.

The general expectation is that as a country facing a housing crisis, people will use this week to raise awareness of the numbers of empty homes and apply pressure for action to be taken to reduce the total number of empty homes and in the process reduce homelessness. A laudable goal.

Now, I don’t have a problem with that at all, it seems morally wrong to me for people to be missing out on a basic human need due to the stockpiling of shelter and that is why Crawley has adopted the strictest penalty legally available to us for penalising homes being left vacant: increasingly high council tax rates levied upon empty properties.

However, I do have concerns about people confusing its key message ‘there’s a housing crisis and we should be looking at every avenue, including all these empty homes, to fix it’ with ‘there are lots of empty homes, which is why there’s no real housing crisis’. I regularly see people saying that we don’t need to build new homes, just fill up all the empty ones. Unfortunately, these comments are ignorant of the kinds of numbers we’re talking about.

It’s estimated that there are 250,000 empty units in the UK, but there are 278,000 households which meet the criteria for ‘statutory homelessness’ and that number is dwarfed by the total number of households who do not meet the criteria for statutory homelessness, but still lack their own property.

Even if the number were to match, there is the issue of location, with many of those empty units being located in communities distant from where the housing demand is located. Ultimately this is a consequence of the uneven economic growth across the UK which seriously requires regions other than London to be Levelled Up to avoid the ongoing relocation of the country’s population towards London and the South East where the best job opportunities are based.

By contrast, Crawley currently has record numbers in temporary housing and a waiting list in the thousands (it would be much higher, but it is far harder to qualify to join the list than was historically the case), but a grand total of 0.0% long-term empty properties and with short-term vacancies largely being the time it takes to refurbish a property in-between tenants (council or private). Empty properties will play no significant role of any kind in meeting the housing needs of this town, only building sufficient numbers of homes local people can afford will ever square that circle.