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Monday, July 07, 2008, 18:10
The council’s ‘trailblazing’ Empty Homes Team is working with other departments to draw up proposals ‘to force the sale of privately owned, long term empty properties’.
But the authority stressed the enforcement action will only happen in cases where owners owe the council money and have either been ‘unwilling or unable to deal with the property and its associated problems’.
The action is seen as one solution to problems caused by abandoned properties.
A three-year plan will go before the council’s Cabinet for approval on July 15.
The Empty Homes Team intends to use ‘a variety of innovative measures’, in addition to enforcement ‘to tackle the problem of houses lying empty for years whilst the city’s low earners struggle to find affordable housing’.
These include:
converting and re-using empty properties
making the best use of brownfield sites
supporting regeneration of deprived neighbourhoods
encouraging more owners to let their properties.
The Empty Homes Strategy aims to ‘increase the city’s supply of decent, energy efficient and affordable private homes’.
Cllr Peter Brookshaw, Cabinet member for Housing and Safer Communities, said: “It’s a disgraceful waste to have so many homes standing empty for long periods of time when affordable housing is in such short supply.
“Besides anything else, these properties are a blight on their local neighbourhoods and often prove a magnet for anti social behaviour such as graffiti, fly tipping and vandalism.”
During the past five years the Empty Home Team has brought 505 houses back into use.
Between April 2003 and April 2007 the number of private sector homes left empty for more than six months dropped by 1,596.
The team worked on projects with nine social landlords which, with the council, make up the Plymouth Empty Homes Partnership.
This included persuading owners of long-term empty, and often run-down, properties to either renovate or sell.
The team also took compulsory purchase action against owners who were impossible to trace.
And under its HouseLet scheme, the team used 62 previously empty homes as good quality, temporary accommodation for nearly 350 homeless families who would otherwise have been housed in bed-and-breakfast accommodation.
It also works with Devonport LOTS (Living Over the Shop), a project, in partnership with Sarsen Housing Association, to provide flats for rent.
LOTS is funded by£220,000 from Devonport Regeneration Community Partnership, £102,000 of Housing Corporation Temporary Social Housing Grant and £380,000 from owners of commercial premises.
David Ireland, chief executive of the charitable Empty Homes Agency, said: “Plymouth City Council has a fine record of action to tackle the scandal of empty property.
“Its strategy of combining prevention, support for owners and a willingness to take enforcement action where necessary demonstrates good practice in empty homes work.”
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