Councillor Richard Kemp and Why Houses Must Go.

Grant Shapps has again stepped in to delay the demolition of the Welsh Streets in Liverpool.  This saga has been dragging on now for seven  years. So long in fact that you would be forgiven if you'd forgotten what the point of the demolition was in the first place. So here is Councillor Richard Kemp to explain. Councillor Kemp is the leader of the Liberal Democrats in local government and vice chair of the LGA, a councillor on Liverpool City council and vice chair of a housing association. He is by all accounts a highly respected figure in local government and housing circles. But he has, as one Liverpool resident put it to me last week, “got blood on his hands.” This is of course metaphorical blood. But the polarisation of opinion on housing in Liverpool runs so deep that it would make little difference if it were real blood. Cllr Kemp has not only instigated many of the housing clearance programmes in Liverpool he is actively in favour of continuing the policy of demolishing houses and the Welsh Streets is his next target. In a recent blog post he explains why.

It (housing market renewal demolition) was predicated on a fact – Liverpool has too many two up two down Victorian properties for which there would not be a market to the current extent even if they were modernised.

A worrying start. This isn't a fact, it's an opinion, and one that doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. In areas where homes were modernised such as Chimney Pot Park in Salford the demand has been huge.

Anyway he goes on : We actually went and asked a vital group of people a simple question in 1998, “Why did you move out of Liverpool?” The answer was complex but compelling. They were moving because our services were crap and the housing did not meet their aspirations. They wanted to live in 3 bed roomed detached and semi-detached homes in a nice clean area with a good school. We didn’t provide any of these things.

The comment about crap services is refreshingly honest, but the rest is bizarre. Is this not how cities are supposed to work? People move to the best housing they can afford. They aspire to better housing, and if they can afford it they later move out to semis in the suburbs. The fact people did so in Liverpool is entirely normal. This is not to say that the Welsh Streets were without problems, but it hardly justifys knocking them down.  Had the Welsh streets had been left alone another generation of people would have followed. But the Welsh streets were not left alone. Instead the council consulted residents on whether they should be demolished. Cllr Kemp explains:

They (residents of the Welsh streets) overwhelmingly supported limited demolition. In the Welsh Streets for example after a 3 year consultation process 68% of local residents voted for a demolition programme and only 15% voted against. That’s democracy in action.

Note the word “limited” The consultation actually showed 338 against and only 97 in favour of the near total demolition of the Welsh Streets that is now proposed. It certainly isn’t democracy in action. But what would replace the demolished houses? Kemp explains:

In their place we would create demographically balanced housing with different types of accommodation and different tenures for different people at different times of their life. In other words we would build housing inside which communities could form and neighbourhoods would flourish.

Yet virtually no housing has been built to replace any of the houses that have been demolished in Liverpool. There are no plans for replacement houses in the Welsh streets. No subsidy to pay for new affordable housing. So what was it all for?

In Liverpool 8 if you brought up your children well, gave them a good education there was almost an inevitability that they would move out and take your grand children with them. In other words we had housing policies which by accident or design broke up families and communities because we allowed no flexibility of provision.

So the answer is to demolish the houses and move everybody out guaranteeing the community would be broken up?
Kemp's explanation shows the very strange thinking that led to this bizarre policy. On the one hand diagnosing real social problems and yet prescribing answers that only make things worse. Anyway  it all ought to be academic now. Not only has the government stepped in to try and stop the demolition, they have withdrawn the funding that paid for the whole programme. This might sound bleak, but there is an answer, It's one I have already proposed to the council, and one I will explain in my next post.

Sows ears and silk purses

It’s hard to believe it now, but in the 1970s when I grew up the glamour football team to support was Ipswich town. It happened to be my hometown club, but their support spread far and wide. The team was filled with well-mannered, clean-cut role-models like Paul Mariner, George Burley and Mick Mills. But if you were a bit rebellious and liked your footballers cut a bit rough, there was nobody better than Eric Lazenby Gates; a grizzled and aggressive forward who always managed to look a mess but play with astonishing skill. He was the type of man who even if you dressed him in a Saville Row dinner suit would somehow still look like a tramp.

When I was ten my parents paid for me to go on a summer football course, coached by Ipswich Town players. I found myself in a group coached by Gates. His thick Northeast accent proved too impenetrable for most of the boys, but with Geordies in the family I understood it perfectly. So did my parents who asked me to be moved into another group to get away from the torrent of smutty jokes and filthy language that were part of his coaching style.

Eric Gates disappeared back to the North East with a transfer to Sunderland a few years later and for many years I thought nothing more of him. That was until earlier this week when I found myself outside the house he was brought up in, in the ex colliery town of Ferryhill in county Durham.

Ferryhill has the curse that has befallen many so-called regeneration hot spots. Its renaissance has been put-off or petered-out. The plans were ambitious. In 2006 a ten year plan was announced by the council that would have seen 400 hundred ex miners cottages demolished and hundreds of new homes built in their place. The works started with the flattening of a chunk of houses in streets named after the great industrial men of their day Stephenson, Watt and Faraday.  But then nothing, the money ran out and with the 2008 market crash, investment slipped away. Far from regenerating the area, the talk of demolition caused, those that could, to move away. Today Gates’ house stands among many others empty and forlorn overlooking a few acres of wasteland.  There is no plan B for Ferryhill, or indeed the many other similar areas where ambitious renewal plans have stalled or been shelved half way through. As we await the Comprehensive Spending Review, there seems little prospect that help will come from elsewhere, or that budgets will be replenished to enable stalled regeneration plans to start up again. The age of demolition and rebuild is, for now at least, over.    

But all should not be lost. These houses could be homes again. Creative thinking like the approaches used in Salford or Anfield can remodel terraced housing and make it appealing and attractive to people looking for homes. Regenerating an area doesn’t have to mean flattening it and starting again.  The great news for places like Ferryhill is this approach is cheaper and therefore more financially viable than the plans that have been abandoned. Places can reinvent themselves, just like people. Eric Gates today earns his living travelling around the Northeast as an after dinner speaker , dressed no-doubt in a Saville row dinner suit.

Building Houses on Old Kent Road

When Charles Darrow invented the Monopoly board game. He stuck this area at cheapest end of the board. Not much has changed. The Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle takes up that vast area between Walworth Road and Old Kent Road. It is one of the poorest areas in London. In the early 1990s I was called up to jury service at a trial for a series of people that had been arrested at a crack house on this estate. It wasn’t a comfortable experience. The trial revealed to me a troubled and frightening place that was failing to do anything more than keep the weather off the people who lived there. No doubt over the years many people tried to create a viable community here, but in the late 1990s the council decided it was beyond hope. The estate and the hideous neighbouring pink shopping centre were scheduled for demolition and replacement with new housing and shops. It sounded like a good idea.

 But this is a big place. And Southwark is not a fleet footed council. It took ten years to find a developer prepared to take it on. And several years more to negotiate with partners over the road layout, access to underground stations and the like.  

Four years later nearly all the people have gone. The estate was emptied (or decanted as housing people like to call it) the bulldozers were ready to roll. Plans were readied for replacement homes. Something was going to happen.

But when I visited yesterday it was silent. 1000 empty flats and not a sign of a builder. The Heygate like many other big housing regeneration project ran into trouble with falling house prices in 2008. The projected income from sales of new homes no longer added up. The development ground to a halt. Like many other stalled projects there was hope that it would be bailed out by generous government grants. After all down the road the Aylesbury estate redevelopment was salvaged by a whopping £42 million kick start grant last year. But no such luck  for the Heygate a few weeks ago the unallocated funding in the Kick start programme was cut and doubt thrown over whether similar funding will made available again. The Heygate is just one estate. But there are scores of them around the country stalled, empty and unviable. Some doubt whether bailing out big projects like this is a good idea anyway. But it’s an academic discussion now.

 For years we’ve been told not to worry about the thousands of vacant flats and houses that are in regeneration schemes. “They’re all the process of development,” we were told. But they’re not now. The process and the development have both stopped. Somehow we have to find a way to turn these places back into homes.

In the board game, if you play your cards right it’s easy and cheap to build houses and hotels on Old Kent Road. In reality it’s proving much more difficult.

It's Not Difficult

I think I’d rather be told straight “You’re wrong!” But ours is not the kind of issue that promotes outright opposition. The strongest resistance we normally get goes something like this “Of course I agree that bringing empty homes into use is a good idea, but in practice it’s just too difficult.”

It’s an annoying put down because it would be petulant to get cross in response. But that doesn’t mean I agree.

These words most commonly come from the lips of local authority councillors or people running housing associations. What it generally means is that they know they have to create more homes, but the way they know how to do it is to do a deal with a developer who is building a large new housing development. The skills and knowledge you need to pull off deals like this are not to be sniffed at. Many housing associations are very good at it. And it works – or at least it did.

What it also implies is the skills they used to have to negotiate the purchase of individual houses and the skills to renovate them are no longer needed.

But now housing associations have a problem. Last year just 118,000 homes were built in this country – half the government’s target. That’s half the number of potential deals they need; and unless millions of pounds of taxpayers money is poured in, half the number of new social homes.

Now lets look at a different type of housing supplier; a private landlord. Between them private landlords provide about the same amount of housing as councils and housing associations. Very few try to do deals with developers and hardly any build new homes. Where most acquire property is through buying existing second-hand homes. Visit a property auction house and you will see most that homes are bought by private landlords, what’s more most of those they buy have vacant possession and need to be improved before they can be let. Private landlords it seems still have the skills to buy and renovate empty property.

Now, of course, private landlords operate on a different scale to councils or housing associations. A recent ARLA survey showed the average private landlord owned seven properties. The National Housing Federation’s latest figures show that the average housing association has more than 2,000 properties. But if bringing an empty home into use isn’t too difficult for a landlord who owns a handful of property, there’s no rational reason why it should be too difficult for a landlord who owns thousands. The housing market has changed, and if social housing is going to keep pace it needs to borrow the skills of private landlords. Bringing empty homes really is a good idea, and it’s a highly viable way of creating new housing. It’s only too difficult if you don’t know how to do it.

What does all this mean for housing?

The housing business is moaning and groaning. The housing press is sounding downbeat too. Why? Apparently our new government hasn’t had much to say on housing. It barely mentioned the subject in the coalition agreement and it has downgraded the housing minister post so the incumbent will no longer attend cabinet. Does this matter? and what do we know about the government’s willingness to do anything about getting empty homes into use? I thought it time to have a look. Firstly lets have a look at the cast:

The Cabinet Minister in charge of local government, communities and housing is Eric Pickles a man who led Bradford Council in the early 1990s and will undoubtedly be an influential member of the government. Tim Williams says that Pickles’ experience is a double-edged sword for a man who will unquestionably wield it to the budget. He knows what he’s doing, but on the other hand may be too familiar with local government, and knows where the bodies are buried. It strikes me that these are both commendations for somebody who is in charge. Either way Pickles doesn’t look like a man to be messed with. When Hazel Blears was given this job a couple of years ago, there was an air of levity amongst commentators with few resisting the temptation to talk about her size. This time nobody has dared mention Mr Pickle’s size!

Grant Shapps has the distinction on being the housing minister who had the longest wait. As he is fond of saying, he shadowed four Labour housing ministers over nearly as many years before finally getting the job himself. So any criticism of inexperience is surely unfounded. He will be tasked with amongst other things replacing the national affordable housing programme, which funds housing associations, and overhauling the planning system.

Finally Liberal Democrat Andrew Stunnell, has been appointed a junior minister, probably with responsibility for housing . This may be a bit of a surprise, although he was Lib Dem housing shadow prior to Sarah Teather. And he is clearly highly regarded enough by his party leader to have formed part of the negotiating team that struck the coalition deal with the Conservatives.

By the way; much as it would have been great for her to be here too, Sarah Teather was appointed an Education Minister.

So will this rather motley crew be willing to do anything about getting empty homes into use. We know what they have said. In opposition Grant Shapps proposed changes to housing association funding to allow them to buy and lease private empty property. He also proposed powers for the public to force public owners of empty properties to get them into use. The Liberal Democrats proposed that empty homes should form a major part of a policy of increasing housing, pledging to get 250,000 empty homes into use.

All very different from the Labour government’s approach, which was to give local authorities powers to force private owners to put their houses in order

What strikes me is that the two coalition parties’ approaches aren’t so very different. They are both about encouraging housing associations to get involved in privately owned empty homes, they are both about incentives rather than coercion, and they both acknowledge that reused empty homes are a cost effective way of creating new housing. The fact that this issue wasn’t in the coalition agreement may in fact be a good sign. It may suggest that it isn’t contentious. If there are differences it is unlikely to be over approach, it’ll be scale. Will there be some minor tweaking to HCA funding, or will the government see this as a significant way of creating more homes?

Perhaps the answer to that lies in the influence of these new ministers. With due respect to Andrew Stunnell, this is likely to be a Conservative rather than Liberal democrat led issue. Although they have made far less play of it Conservative pledges to overhaul the funding system, reduce costs, and create a panning system that encourages rather than forces areas to accept more homes, could create a system that makes it a lot easier to get empty homes into use than build new homes. So perhaps the surprising conclusion is that whilst the housing industry may be moaning If you think that more should be done in getting homes into use there may be a lot to be very optimistic about.

New Empty Homes Figures - Not Good News

Government quietly slipped some new empty homes statistics this morning. They’re still not published on their website, but can be seen here in Barbara Follet’s answer to a parliamentary question from Caroline Spellman. They show (as we anticipated) the numbers of empty homes continues to rise. The total for England now tops 764,000 the third successive annual increase. These figures show an increase of about 3% which if repeated across the whole of the UK would see the total pass 970,000. Given that these figures are a year behind anyway, I take no pleasure in saying that we really must be approaching a million empty homes across the UK.

A truely edifying spending cut

Being a property anorak I couldn’t stop myself dragging my family around the Peckham House this weekend. It’s not empty, in fact it was full to bursting with visitors for the London open house weekend. Some of you may remember this remarkable house as one of the stars of the Grand Designs tv series. The extraordinary owners managed to create a house in the most unpromising site imaginable, with planning restrictions that would have lead most to think that there was no chance of being allowed to build anything. But not only did they gain permission, they built a house that is pure joy, for the price of a very ordinary flat.

It is that imaginative thinking and that tenacious determination that we need more of if more homes are going to be created out of empty properties. It is easy to see why it is difficult to return empty homes to use, and easy to see how it would be expensive to try, but with imagination and tenacity almost anything is possible. Today I have ben talking to two great examples of both. Urban Infill’s idea is to fill not just the voids in buildings, but the voids around and above them too. You might think of this as filling the missing teeth in the smile of a streetscape

For sheer tenacity look no further than Phoenix housing cooperative. I’ve written about them before, but their latest project in Bow East London shows how tenacity and hard work can overcome huge financial shortfalls. The four flats that they have asked me to open this Friday had been abandoned buy their owner because they were uneconomic to reuse. But for a sixth of the cost Phoenix have brought them back into use
More imagination and tenacity was called for by the Audit Commission last week. It concluded that councils had become too focussed on building new homes at the expense of reusing old ones. It said that by tackling just 5% of empty homes councils could save a staggering £500billion from their homelessness costs. A rather more edifying public spending cut than some have been suggesting over the last few days

Taking the Market Out of Irish Housing

We think we’ve got a problem. I’m in Ireland for the national social housing conference and the mood is sombre. The housing market in Ireland overheated to a quite phenomenal degree, and is now in full-scale retreat. The damage it has caused is what I have been asked here to talk about. Estimates vary, but even the most conservative say that 200,000 surplus flats have been built. Added to Ireland’s already sizeable empty homes problem it means there could be anything up to 400,000 homes standing empty. The quite extraordinary plan to be unveiled by the housing minister here in a couple of hours, is for the state to effectively take them over. The government has set up NAMA The National Asset Management Authority. It plans to take on €90 billion of property on 20-year leases and let them to those in housing need. It’s an incredibly bold move. But there are plenty here who also think it’s insane. The opening session of this conference yesterday was entitled "taking the market out of housing" That appears to be exactly what they are planning.

Can I have an Empty Home? Yes You Can!

One of the commonest questions we are asked at the Empty Homes Agency goes something like this “I need a home, but I can’t afford one, can I have an empty one?”

For reasons that are pretty obvious it’s a question we are getting asked more and more often. Our answer I’m pleased to report is the Obama like “Yes you can” In fact even better than that we can sometimes even offer a choice. Our answer goes something like this:

“First of all you can borrow one. The best way to do this is through a shortlife housing cooperative. The cooperative usually takes out a lease on an empty property, puts it into shape and rents it out to its members at low rents. There are lots of cooperatives in London and the south of England such as Westminster Housing Cooperative that operates across London. But shortlife is more sparsely distributed around the midlands and the North of England.

Secondly you can rent an unused property. A similar approach to shortlife has lead to the amazing growth of property guardian schemes. An idea imported for the Netherlands, companies such as Ad Hoc and Camelot have developed it into a flourishing business. Available for employed single people and couples in town and country across the UK and Ireland

Thirdly for a more involved approach there are a number of brilliant self-help housing charities that train homeless people up with building skills and enable them to do up empty properties and create their own homes. The properties are generally surplus social housing. Charities such as Latch and Community Campus 87 lead a growing sector largely based in cities in the North of England.”

Many people are happy with our answer, but many I suspect would like something else. Apparently, even now 90% of us want to be owner-occupiers, and there’s no reason to think that people in housing need don’t have similar aspirations to the rest of the population.

And why not? You should also be able to buy a property cheaply and do it up yourself. In previous recessions “homesteading” has been available to people who would otherwise would be unable to afford homeownership. Councils and Housing Associations disposed of their properties at heavily discounted prices. Newcastle City Council even sold flats for 50p each in the 1990s.

Homesteading schemes helped people with renovating the property sometimes with the help of a grant, sometimes with training. Conditions were normally applied to ensure that only people who intend to become part of the community bought the properties. Speculators were heavily discouraged. This meant that areas with high levels of vacancy and high turnover of residents were stabilised with new long-term occupants who had a strong investment in the community.
Just the ticket for regenerating communities and giving people what they want. It has worked brilliantly in previous recessions, there is no reason why it won’t work in this one. Indeed it could work on privately owned properties acquired especially for the purpose. If you are a council or a property owner who is interested please let me know and let’s make that answer to “can I have an empty home?” even better.

Some good news on reposessions

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the victims of the housing market downturn; tenants in buy-to-let properties. Many have found themselves homeless because their landlord has not kept up with mortgage repayments and had their property repossessed. If the cause were the tenant not paying their rent well fair enough perhaps, but all too often it’s no fault of the tenant at all. Most mortgage agreements contain clauses that require the landlord to seek the lenders permission to grant a tenancy. Many landlords don’t realise it’s there and others just ignore it. After all what lender is going to kick up a fuss? Very few probably so long as mortgage payments are kept up.

But here’s the rub. If the landlord doesn’t keep up with payments and gets repossessed, (and there are plenty of buy-to-let investors who geared themselves up too high and find themselves in difficulty), the tenancy is deemed null and void and the tenants kicked out by the lender.
Good news on this today. The government has announced that it is consulting on new rights for tenants to avoid the worst of this. Within their press release a dreadful story showing why action on this needed “A lone parent with two children who had been renting a property for 10 months. She came back from a holiday to find the locks had been changed and there was a notice announcing that a possession order had been made.”

Unaffordability - the saviour of our housing market

Last week I reported on the truly staggering empty homes problem in the United States. The popular repost is - it could never happen here. Well possibly, but probably not for the reasons you might think

When the property market started falling last year there was much talk of what the graph would look like. Would it be a quick down and up “V”, a slower “U”, a down up down and up “W”, a down and stay down “L”, or my particular favourite analogy a down, stay down, then up “skip shape”.

A year in, with talk of property prices and stock markets rising, and banks back in the black, it is now apparent that the “U”, “L” and “skip” property markets are not on the cards. We may have a quick “V” downturn after all. To many people three months of house price rises have come as something of a surprise. The flood of repossessions was less extensive than feared, and with fewer properties on the market, those that are available have scarcity value. Phew, that wasn’t so bad was it, lets crack open the bubbly.

Well hold on there is still the possibility that this may be the middle up slope of the “W”. Or indeed a shape we haven’t even thought of yet. As I reported here last week the property market in the United States, which started falling six months before ours, has taken a real battering. And although there is no guarantee that ours won’t follow; one little discussed factor may have saved our housing market from meltdown. Ironically it is one that is usually spoken of as its greatest weakness – unaffordability. This problem has resulted in younger people being priced out of owner occupation. Indeed in 2007 the average age of a first time buyer had reached 34, up seven years since 1977. Now as it so happens, it is that same age group that have been hit hardest by the recession. Increases in unemployment have been greatest amongst the young . The older (mortgage holding) work force has been comparatively spared – so far at least. This means that a relatively small number of redundancies have resulted in property repossessions in the UK. The United States on the other hand, with its lower house prices and sub-prime loans, has high owner occupation rates amongst those hit hardest by redundancy. They have been overwhelmed by foreclosures. Some analysts believe there could be 10 million there by 2012.

There are of course many people here whose lives have been devastated by the recession. Not least tenants in buy-to-let properties that find themselves evicted becasue the landlord couldn't keep up with mortgage payments. A further rise in unemployment could well start affecting larger numbers of owner-occupiers as well. In the meantime at least perhaps we should be grateful that millions of us won’t be losing our homes because we couldn’t afford them in the first place.

Enough empty homes to house a whole country!

A truly mind boggling statistic. There are enough empty homes in the USA to house the whole UK population! And in case you thought that was shocking, we have enough empty homes in England alone to house the whole population of the Republic of Ireland.

It's not squatting, it's much more interesting

I was chairing the CIEH’s excellent empty homes conference yesterday, when at lunchtime I turned on my mobile to be confronted with “you have 16 new messages” all of them it turned out from journalists. ITV had tracked me down and were waiting outside. What on earth had provoked this?

The answer it turns out is this. Squatters in Bishops Avenue.
For those of you not obsessed with the self-absorbed world of London real estate, Bishops Avenue in Hampstead is said to be Britain’s most exclusive address. Houses have changed hands here for £80million. So news that squatters were here got the property correspondent’s pulses racing.

The story it turns out is much more interesting than that. Calim Ciufudean and his colleagues are not squatters at all. They are licensees or as he puts it caretakers. The crucial difference is they are here with the owner’s consent. Their company Prep ltd offers to look after properties that have been abandoned. The concept proved a bit difficult for some newspapers to understand but the Sun got it, so did London Tonight on ITV. Although some of their viewers came out with the old lines “why don’t they get a job and rent” Apart from the fact that Calim and his colleagues do have jobs, the prejudices just don’t work here. Calim is a resourceful man who is sorting out his own housing and preventing a property falling into wrack and ruin.

There really is something new here. As the local estate agent in Hampstead said: "There's squatting on Bishops Avenue in every recession but it's becoming more organised and gentlemanly. It was more anarchic in the 70s when squatters used to take possession. It's now more organised than squatting, it's more like house sitting”

National retailers leaving homes empty

Inefficiency in the public sector is always an easy target. Indeed I’m not against having a go about it myself especially when it results in property being needlessly left empty. The target today appears to be quangos. Or should I say QU.A.N.G.O.s (Quasi autonomous non government organisations). The Empty Homes Agency isn’t one in case you were wondering; we are an independent charity with no government funding.

But is inefficiency solely a problem of the public sector? If what I have heard this week is true the answer is no. Several local authorities have told me that a few national retailers have appalling records of leaving residential property they own empty. This seems extraordinary, particularly when these companies are operating in areas with high levels of housing demand, and some of them are struggling to make money from their core business at the moment. I’m amazed not to say dismayed, but the evidence for these accusations appears compelling.

William Hill bookmakers have over 2000 branches nationwide. Many have flats above and many of these are within the ownership or control of the bookmakers. How many are empty? I don’t know but one London borough knows of seventeen just within its own boundary. The smaller Coombe Bookmakers operating in the South East of England seems to have a similar problem. A third bookmaker Coral are apparently very touchy about the subject and threatend one council with court for even raising the matter with them. Since I was told about this I started looking out myself and there appears to be a theme here. All the bookies run by these companies do indeed have what look like empty flats above.

Shell owns over 600 petrol stations in the UK; many of them set amongst houses in towns and villages. A worrying number of neighbouring houses to their stations appear empty. From Hampshire, to Suffolk to Cumbria to London the problem appears the same. On investigation it turns out that many belong to the petrol retailer having been acquired in the past presumably with future expansion in mind. What’s going on I don’t know but at least two (in Guildford and Ipswich) have been empty for more than twenty years.
Is this inefficiency, deliberate policy or merely coincidence? I ‘d be grateful for your own views and reports. Please let us know here, here or leave a comment below

Rubbish Response to Empty Promise Petition

When think tank Policy Exchange published its Cities Unlimited report last year, advocating abandoning regeneration in much of the north, there was uproar. Even David Cameron who had previously been a committed Policy Exchange fan was forced to call it “barmy” “Insane and complete rubbish” John Prescott described it as “the most insulting and ignorant policy I've ever heard”.

So if that idea was so awful, what exactly is the difference with this? Today 10 Downing Street published it’s response to the Inside Housing Empty Promise campaign petition

In response to the general point that the Prime Minister should help reduce the number of empty homes, the government say they agree, but then back-pedal a bit by saying
“Areas with high concentrations of empty homes often do not correspond with areas of high housing need.”

On the need for targeting investment at the problem, the government say they are doing it already but then say:
“this type of approach is not always appropriate as a way of dealing with long-term empty properties in need of repair. Very often it is more expensive to refurbish homes to the standard we expect than to build them from scratch. Homes also have to be of the right type and size and in the right place. The empty homes figures assume that the empty homes are where the need lies, which is not necessarily the case.”

So what should we make of this as a statement of government policy? A summary might be empty homes are only worth reusing if they’re cheaper to refurbish than building new homes, and only worth doing if they’re somewhere with established housing demand.
Not much ambition to regenerate our inner cities in that , not much ambition to help resolve the blight of empty homes in people’s neighbourhoods either, and no apparent regard for the environmental consequences. If Cities Unlimited was rubbish, so I’m afraid, is this.

The Liverpool Legacy

Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture ended last week, and there has been much discussion as to what sort of legacy it will leave. It has certainly made a change to have a positive spotlight on what for me is one of this country’s greatest cities.

With the enormous new “Liverpool One” shopping centre taking shape, a revitalised Pier Head and a new cruise liner dock their can be little doubt that the city centre is looking forward with confidence.

A mile or two away however and regeneration of Liverpool’s housing stock looks less rosy. Anfield contains a greater volume of empty homes than anywhere else in the UK. Liverpool’s housing regeneration was based on trying to attract the housing boom into areas of the city with depressed housing markets. Large volumes of homes were bought up and left vacant in the hope that they would appeal as large development sites to big housing developers. Unfortunately it hasn’t worked, and with the housing boom over there is nothing to attract.

Like many other towns and cities Liverpool has it’s fair share of vacant new flats too, but nowhere has the combination of overoptimistic housing developers, and regenerators left so much damage. The legacy of culture for this city is surely bright, but the housing legacy is in need of urgent attention. This superbly edited video speaks a thousand words.

Empty home owners prolonging the recession

I spent part of Christmas in my hometown of Ipswich. Being on holiday I was not on empty homes alert, but I could hardly miss this. When these waterfront homes were first planned a decade ago they were supposed to help turn the town from a working port into an executive service based economic hub. It hasn’t worked. The port has disappeared downstream, but the executives never really materialised. Like almost everywhere else in the UK the population of Ipswich is filled with ordinary people who need homes at ordinary prices. Instead what they’ve got is homes built for a hypothetical population at hypothetical prices. The reason they stay empty is because the owners have not yet accepted that the prices need to drop drastically. Only when they do, and only when people start buying them will we be able to say that housing market has bottomed out.

In the meantime the one thing that could knock some sense into this ludicrous situation is the council using its enforcement powers to force the owners to get then occupied. Councillor Harsant’s comments don’t lead me to think this is imminent. But there’s nothing to stop the council doing this and forcing the owners to accept the true market rental value. It may sound draconian, but to do otherwise is simply storing up a bigger financial hit for the owner later, and putting the prospect of housing market recovery ever further away.

Crash!

There’s always somebody who does well in a recession. This time 1980’s band the Primitives must be looking forward to the next royalty cheque. Their hit song “Crash” has been the backtrack to virtually every news report on the economy this week. Including this cruel but fair ode to TV presenter Kirsty Allsop who allegedly said that she would eat her hat if UK house prices dropped.

What’s The Truth About The £200 million Empty Homes Fund?

Many people seem to be under the impression that the government has launched a fund to enable councils and housing associations to buy up empty homes. Nice idea, but unfortunately untrue. Housing Minister Iain Wright, explained earlier in the week that what had happened was that the Housing Corporation had granted an extra £200 million to help housing associations buy property from developers. Amazingly despite this, two days later we find here the deputy Prime Minister. Standing in for Gordon Brown on Friday coming out with the empty homes fund line again. Although as Vince Cable pointed out on Friday, £200 million wouldn’t make much difference anyway, and he rightly called for a larger fund that would allow housing associations to buy more empty homes. The Times summarised his point with this telling graphic.

Empty Homes Up Again

Last month we reported that numbers of empty homes had gone up for the first time in 9 years. My prediction then was that this was the start of a trend rather than a blip. Some people disagreed. Well sorry to say told you so. But here is the latest information from 6months later released today in a PQ
Number of empty homes in England October 2006: 748,159
Number of empty homes in England October 2007: 762,635The anoraks might spot that both these figures are greater than the 693,000 we reported last month. The reason is these figures are taken directly from council tax records, the 693,000 is a sum of every council’s own figures.