Want to know where all the empty homes are? You can't

Imagine for a moment that there is a map of the whole country that shows where every empty home is, how long it has been empty, and who owns it. Imagine too that it is published on-line by the government, it is continually updated and is free to use. Wouldn’t that be amazing for organisations that refurb homes and create affordable housing?

Putting aside the privacy issues for a moment, who should be allowed to use this map? Should it be freely available to everybody?

If not, who?

Imagine no longer. The map actually exists as I described. It’s called the Empty Homes GIS Toolkit and is published by the Homes and Communities Agency. They, in conjunction with Ordnance Survey, who actually own the maps, decided, probably wisely, that access should be restricted. Unless you have signed something called the Public Sector Mapping Agreement you aren’t allowed to see the map.

Who is allowed to sign this agreement? Not, me, and not you, unless you work for what is considered to be a public sector body. This leaves the rather bizarre situation that:

Housing Associations
Housing cooperatives
Housing Charities
Universities …are banned from seeing the map

But Government departments, and local councils, and others including
Royal National Lifeboats
Mountain rescue services
Cancer registries
Areas of Outstanding National Beauty … are allowed full access

Now let's come back to those privacy issues. You wouldn’t want details of empty houses being broadcast to everybody would you? So the line has to be drawn somewhere. That somewhere appears to be between government and non- government organisations. The implication being only government organisations can be trusted with keeping information about property secure.  But a quick look at the list of signatories shows that the UK’s biggest broadcaster, the BBC has full access to the map.

So here is a goldmine of information that could be invaluable to housing associations and other affordable housing providers and help get empty homes back into use. That is hampered by a set of rules that prevent those that could use it actually seeing it. If ever there was a case of nonsensical bureaucratic rules that needed changing it is surely this.

Information on empty homes - It's bad for your mental health

The government is, according to Eric Pickles “committed to transparency”. Good! It has not always been so. Back when we I started this blog in 2006 access to information about vacant property was an issue I wrote about frequently because I thought it was being handled so badly. In one bizarre case we dealt with, a local authority denied a man information about empty homes because they thought, to give it to him, would affect his mental health! Judging by his reaction I think denying it to him had a worse effect.

We no longer seem to have ludicrous cases like that, but the problem is not resolved. Here’s why it matters:

We know central and local government have detailed data on all the vacant properties in this country. They know where they are, how long they have been empty,  and who owns them. We also know that there are many resourceful people who can make use of those properties, by buying, renting, or developing them. It is surely obvious that if the resourceful people know where the properties are they are more likely to be able to do something about them. This principle is not novel or new it already happens for big development sites. Just look at the Surplus Land register, and the National Land Use database. These databases encourage big developers to make use of both public and privately owned vacant land by publishing details about it.

It works. So why not apply the same principle to vacant homes? Back in 2007 I spent a day in the Information Tribunal giving evidence on a case that involved this principle. The local government answer given in that case seemed to be people can’t be trusted. The thinking might be summarised as: telling big developers about vacant property is fine, but ordinary people? No way! They might do bad things like smash the house up, set fire to it, or fill it full of rowdy squatters. Best to be cautious and not tell anybody.

Of course there are some risks and some legal issues to disclosing information, but these can be managed, and indeed already are for the vacant land databases.

The trouble is, trustworthy or not, big developers are no longer buying land, and it is becoming obvious that if housing development is going to continue we will need many more small developments on small sites carried out by small developers and resourceful people.

 It’s time to look at this again. Let’s be transparent about empty homes and give resourceful people what they need to turn the vacant properties back into homes.  

The government's secret empty homes

This week the US federal government admitted to holding on to 50,000 vacant homes. It was rightly reported as a scandal; but what about the UK? How many empty homes is our government sitting on? By my estimate the problem is proportionately worse here, but the real scandal is we don’t actually know. Data on privately owned empty homes is widely available, But official data on the government’s empty housing stock must count as one of the worst compiled and most obscure sets of statistics available. The official figure says they own 4,802 empty homes. See column “AQ” here if you want the source. What’s wrong with it?

Firstly it’s untrue. Just one government agency (Defence Estates) admits to owning double that number, and there are tens of other property-holding agencies and government departments. And that’s before we have even considered one of the biggest sinners – the NHS.
Secondly it’s complied by people who don’t know. This figure is a sum of what each local authority in England thinks there might be in its area. But they have no real way of knowing. Government who should know the answer, just collates an estimate from other people who don’t know.
Thirdly would you have found the figure buried in an obscure spreadsheet called HSSA with a column entitled “other public”? No. It’s hidden where nobody will find it, and not mentioned anywhere else (until now!).

Government Agencies like the NHS and MOD seem to have a particular problem with empty homes. The MOD has a vacancy rate of 17%, ten times the rate of an average housing association. Of course there are special reasons, but the main one is they are an organisation that does something else- defence. They are not good property managers. And of course they are publicly funded, so management failure just gets absorbed as a cost, with no adverse consequences. The MOD are not alone, it’s what happens with most big organisations that have a bit of residential accommodation on the side. Many government agencies have a historic stock of staff living accommodation that is no longer made available to staff, others like the Department of Transport historically owned hundreds of vacant homes that they held as a land bank for future road expansion.

The first step to tackling any problem is owning up to it in the first place. The government has rightly issued guidance about how others should bring empty properties back into to use, but remains highly secretive about the empty homes it owns itself. Yes there are more privately than publicly owned empty homes, but that doesn’t excuse inaction on the publicly owned ones. The first step is for government to audit it’s own housing stock and publish the list of empty homes they own. It might, like in the States, cause people to say it’s a scandal. But it will be less of a scandal than what we have now- secrecy.

A failure to tackle empty homes? perhaps, but no lack of ideas

Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps strongly criticised what he called the government's failure to tackle empty homes in Inside Housing this week.
(The government) he said “have utterly failed to tackle the glut of empty homes we have sitting empty while families are desperate for a roof over their heads.” Is he right?

With political parties all furiously putting together their election manifestos this might be a good point to look at what each of the main parties have done and what they promise on empty homes.

First the Government. Since it’s been in power it’s actually done quite a lot.
It amended VAT rules so that works on properties empty for two years or more are charged at a reduced VAT rate.
It introduced the housing market renewal programme that was tasked with reducing vacancy in the most depressed housing markets in the England
It has introduced a capital allowance scheme that allows owners of shops to offset tax on the costs of refurbishing empty flats above.
It introduced flexibility for councils to set their own council tax discount on empty homes.
It introduced empty dwelling management orders allowing councils to take over the management of long term empty homes.
But the success has been mixed. Since they have been in power empty home numbers have reduced significantly, but they have crept up again in the last three years. Take up of tax relief schemes is low, 45% of councils still offer full discounts on empty homes and to date there have only been 24 EDMOs.

What is it saying now? Over the last year the government’s comments on empty homes have been very much geared towards making EDMOs work. It has run a seminar for councils and has endorsed the EHA’s guidance on EDMOs. There have been no new policy promises

The Conservatives haven’t of course been in government for eleven years, but locally Conservative administrations in London Birmingham and Kent have devoted attention and resource to councils to tackle the issue. There’s been significant success in Birmingham and Kent, but it is too early to judge what’s happening in London. In their recent housing green paper the Conservatives promissed two measures to tackle empty homes :
The empty property rescue scheme would divert affordable housing resources to reusing empty homes, and would temporarily reduce requirements to encourage take up.
Extending and reinvigorating the PROD (public request ordering disposal) scheme giving power to people to request the sale of long term empty publicly owned buildings and extending it to all government bodies and quangos.

The Liberal Democrats have set out several measures in recent months to tackle empty homes.
Equalise VAT rates on renovation and new-build.
Amend commercial property rate relief rules to allow owners of empty commercial property used temporarily as housing to continue to claim rate relief.
Introduce a Repair and Renewal loan scheme for owners of empty properties if they agree to lease them for at least five years to housing associations as social housing.
Allow housing associations and local authorities to use funding from the Homes and Communities Agency to refurbish newly purchased private empty homes.
Make £40m available in Homes and Communities Agency grant for short-life housing.

So is Grant Shapps right? Well that’s your call. But the significant thing is that all parties have a lot to say on empty homes. In the run up to the last general election none of the parties even bothered mentioning it. The empty homes problem may be getting worse, but at least, now there is a real debate on how to tackle it.

Oh Goody! Another Government National Register

I’ve just been listening to the government’s response to the Rugg review on the Private Rented Sector. It didn’t leave me enthused. The key proposal is to introduce a national register of every private rented property and landlord in the country funded by a fee to the landlord of around £85. This will sit on top of existing HMO licensing, selective licensing, additional licensing and the myriad of discretionary accreditation schemes.

What the government has done is fall into the research trap. Julie Rugg is fine woman and a highly respected academic. But if you ever give a researcher a job to do, you can be certain that the top recommendation they will come back with is – let’s do more research. On this point Julie Rugg didn’t disappoint. It was the top recommendation of her review. No doubt similar studies got the government thinking that a national ID database was a good idea too.