Local authorities across England have called on the government to give them more powers to deal with empty properties and holiday homes, as cash-strapped councils turn to new methods to combat growing housing pressures.
Councils from London to Leeds are pursuing council tax premiums, providing grants for property refurbishment, working with genealogists to identify unknown owners and exploring innovative legal means to take control of empty homes.
Housing secretary Michael Gove singled out the issue of empty homes in the government’s recently passed Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, which allows councils to charge double the rate of council tax on properties that have been empty for at least one year, up from the standard levy at present.
The increased levy — which is not due to take effect until at least April, according to ministers — comes alongside a new double council tax charge on furnished second homes. Owners of homes unoccupied for more than five and 10 years also face higher bills.
Helen Dennis, Labour cabinet member for new homes and sustainable development at Southwark council in London, welcomed the new charges but said the government needed to do more to help local authorities.
“We’ve got a housing crisis . . . and so where we can bring properties back into use, we want to do that as soon as possible,” she said. “Government policy is really prohibitive at the moment . . . we need more resources and more tools.” She raised the idea of registration scheme for landlords who use travel accommodation app Airbnb and higher housing allowance benefits.
Southwark has developed a scheme of loans and grants to provide incentives for private owners to rent out empty properties, but the programme remains small. The borough has also allocated additional funds to pursue compulsory purchase orders, although Dennis said the mechanism was a costly way of filling properties.
The log jam in the social rental sector, high costs in the private rental sector and the chronic undersupply of housing nationwide have forced councils across England to find temporary accommodation for tens of thousands of people.
A lack of government funding has put almost one in five councils at risk of de facto bankruptcy, according to the Local Government Association.
Figures published in October by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities showed more than 260,000 residential properties in England that had been empty over the long term. Meanwhile, there are about 70,000 holiday homes in England and Wales, according to census data from 2021.
Luke Murphy, associate director for housing at the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank, said holiday homes were having a big impact on property markets in some areas, but that the broader problem of empty units should not be overstated.
“It feels egregious in certain local settings, but it’s actually not one of the driving issues. The problem in our housing market is that we have failed to build the homes that we need to build,” he said.
Tower Hamlets in east London has already applied the 100 per cent empty homes discretionary premium and plans to impose the 200 per cent rate once it takes effect.
Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets, said that while housebuilding was the council’s main priority, cracking down on empty units helped ease immediate pressures and generate revenue.
“Homes are built, but they’re left empty or vacant,” he said, noting that the borough had 23,000 people on a waiting list for council housing.
Tower Hamlets is also exploring legal means to take control of privately owned empty units, with Canary Wharf identified as a priority area. Rahman said he “would like to see long-term vacant second properties seized for rehousing of residents”.
In the north of England, the West Yorkshire borough of Calderdale near Leeds has teamed up with genealogists Fraser & Fraser to locate estate executors or living relatives of the deceased owners of properties that remain empty as a result of probate.
Labour’s Councillor Scott Patient, who heads Calderdale’s housing portfolio, said the council had been forced to resort to such a novel method because existing legal means of addressing underused housing were ineffective.
“Even if we threw 100 people at this, it wouldn’t necessarily make that much of a difference,” said Patient, adding that the council tax premium did little to deter property owners. “There are no sanctions beyond — let’s call it what it is — a small financial penalty.”
Short-term lets and Airbnbs are another source of upward pressure on housing prices, particularly in coastal areas such as Cornwall and Norfolk that are also tourist hotspots.
Last year, North Norfolk district council hired an empty homes revenue generating officer in a push to persuade homeowners to make better use of vacant properties.
Deputy leader Wendy Fredericks, a Liberal Democrat councillor, said the council was exploring ways of using empty and holiday homes as temporary accommodation amid a funding strain that has made it difficult to provide emergency support to homeless people.
“We’ve been frantically trying to find solutions on the ground because there isn’t anything from government,” said Fredericks.
Planning law has also become a way for local authorities to curtail the rising housing prices associated with holiday homes. In 2019, residents in St Ives in Cornwall in effect curbed second-home ownership by voting for a neighbourhood plan forbidding the sale of new housing units to people not intending to use them as a primary residence.
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said: “We have reduced the number of long-term empty homes by more than 38,000 since 2010 by giving councils powers to bring empty properties back into use to deliver new homes for communities.”
“We have also recently laid out our ambitious long-term plan for housing and are on track to deliver 1mn homes this parliament,” a spokesperson added.
Additional reporting by Ella Hollowood in London
This story has been amended since first publication after the government corrected the number of long-term empty homes it had reduced since 2010.
