Kits and Mortar

How many empty homes do you think there are in the UK? Given the Government’s constant concern about the lack of homes, the ten-year waiting lists for council housing, the ambitious target of 240,000 new houses to be built each year, you’d think there couldn’t possibly be that many empty homes lying about unwanted, wouldn’t you? I mean, if we’re that short of houses, only an idiot would let a house go begging, right?

I was astonished to learn from last night’s Cheap Homes for Sale? (BBC3, 9pm) that there are 830,000 empty properties in the UK, and most of them are owned not by private landlords, but by councils and the Government. By the end of the programme, I could feel my activist gene itching again. The UK’s housing is in a parlous state, but central and local government seem to be totally out of touch with reality.

Cheap Homes for Sale? started off quite predictably, with presenter Alex Riley searching for a property in London under £200,000 and discovering that pretty much all he can afford is a closet – literally. He visits the smallest flat in London, which is actually a tiny bedsit, smaller than 3m x 2m and on the market for £180,000. He goes on to talk about how estate agents such as Foxtons will go all out to sell houses, pressuring people to buy houses they can’t afford so that they can get their commission.

He also visits The Home Buyer Show at ExCeL, which turns out not to be for home buyers at all but for property developers and investors. Indeed, the people he speaks to there laugh at him when he says that all he wants is to buy a home. They’re not there for homes, they’re after investments and the credit crunch is providing them with plenty of opportunities to “cash in on other people’s misfortune” as the number of repossessions increases.

But it’s not until Riley starts talking about empty houses that the programme really starts to shock. He goes up to the North Circular, where over a stretch of about a mile there are dozens of empty houses, all bricked up. Apparently, hundreds of houses were bought up by Transport for London and were emptied because they were going to be demolished to make way for a road widening scheme. That scheme’s been trashed now, but the houses still sit empty.

Riley talks to David Ireland, whom I presume is the same David Ireland of Empty Homes, a charity campaigning to “highlight the waste of empty property in England and works with others to devise and promote solutions to bring empty property back into use.”

Ireland gives the figure of 830,000 empty homes, which would be enough property to house the majority of people on council housing waiting lists. At this point, I’m starting to get quite angry.

Down in the SE London’s Ferrier Estate, owned by Greenwich Council, hundreds of flats have been lying empty for up to four years. Riley talks to some teenagers about the council’s plans for redevelopment:

“They said they were going to do it in the next five years,” says the hoodie-wearing teen, “but now they say it’s going to be another five years. It’s taking too long. There are homeless people living on the street when they could be in a nice warm house with TV, get comfortable, sleep somewhere in the warm. It seems it’s just going to waste at the end of the day.”

If a teen can understand why leaving these homes empty is wrong, then why can’t the council? Now in truth, some of these old developments really do need ripping down because the architecture is grossly anti-social, but the council have to either get on with it, or open up this housing for short-term lets whilst they get their act together.

In Oxford, there are more empty homes:

But it’s in Liverpool that things get really disgraceful. There are 15,000 empty properties in Liverpool and, in one area where Ringo Starr grew up, street after street of huge Victorian bay-window terraces lie bricked up and empty. Apparently this is due to the Government’s Pathfinder scheme. (Just take a look at the hideous housing in the background of the header photo on this page – I’d bet it’s of a far lower quality than the Victorian terraces due to be demolished.)

Pathfinder encourages local councils to find areas of ‘housing market failure’ that include high percentages of empty houses where no one wants to live. The councils then get billions of pounds to move remaining residents out, knock down the houses, and rebuild them in partnership with private developers.

These are likely to be the same developers, mind you, that have recently been accused by the Office of Fair Trading of rigging contracts: 112 construction companies “colluded among themselves while bidding for contracts, leading to customers, such as local authorities, having to pay too much… 40 firms had admitted price fixing, and 37 had asked for leniency.”

And we’re not talking small businesses ripping people off here, we’re talking “construction giants Balfour Beatty and Carillion“.

So let’s just get this straight. Liverpool council have been encouraging (and paying) people to leave perfectly sound dwellings and, instead of renovating them, they plan to knock them all down and pay over billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to a corrupt construction industry cartel to build cheap, and probably inferior, housing which will likely be unaffordable to the very people that have been displaced?

The construction industry is already responsible for one third of the UK’s waste, and a hefty chunk of our CO2 emissions. Surely the most economically and environmentally responsible way to tackle regeneration is to renovate and refurbish houses for the people who already live in them? The houses are structurally sound, some with new roofs, so there’s just no real reason for them to be demolished.

Indeed, Riley talks to developers who’ve done exactly that – renovated old terraces and produced beautiful and desirable homes. Ones that I would love to live in! And these developers would be only too happy to buy up and renovate all the empty houses in the areas, in the process rejuvenating the area.

Personally, I think that these houses should be sold off, not en bloc to a handful of developers, but also to private individuals who want to renovate their own house. There’s a huge appetite for renovation amongst the self-build community, and given that the self-builders are greener and more environmentally responsible, it should be compulsory to provide opportunities for them in every big development.

This programme made me absolutely livid. It shows just how incompetent, corrupt and absurd our central and local government are. Indeed, I’m so cross about this that I’m going to write to my MP next week, and I suggest that you do too – particularly as Write To Them makes it so easy.

I have also signed the No. 10 Downing Street Empty Homes petition, which is worded thusly:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require every Local Authority to create a register of empty homes in their area, and following that to enact measures to bring some of them into occupancy thus saving some greenfield building. The Local Development Framework investigations currently being undergone, ignore the potential supply of empty homes of which there are estimated to be 870,000 in the UK (Empty Homes Agency). This is more than 4 year’s supply, according to Kate Barker’s Housing Review.

Submitted by Charles Bazlinton – Deadline to sign up by: 27 January 2009 – Signatures: 211

You should sign it too, and also blog about it, let people know that there’s action to be taken.

And if you’ve tried to climb onto the property ladder but found it just too expensive, then Norfolk & Holmes, the faux estate agent set up by Riley and BBC Scotland, want to hear from you:

We are looking to you, the audience, to email us your stories. *Please use the window on the right to send us emails including, wherever possible, the details as laid out below.*

We want to hear from you: (please be sure to clearly include your name and contact number)

1. Are you a first time buyer who has found it impossible to get on the housing ladder? Tell us your story. Where are you from? Why has it been so difficult? Who do you blame for your current situation? What kind of house are you looking for?

2. Are you a family / individual on a council house waiting list who has been waiting so long they have lost hope? Tell us your situation. Give us the whole story. Who is to blame? What should be done?

3. Seen any empty properties in your area? If it’s been empty for more then 6 months, take a photo and email it in, clearly marking the location/address. Do you know who owns them? (For empty property photos and reports please email nick.jordan@bbc.co.uk All other emails should be sent through the window on the right of this page)

Whenever possible (time and resources dependent) we will take your issues to the politicians and ask them what they are going to do about it.

Finally, Cheap Homes for Sale? is on again on BBC3 on August 26th at 1:10am, August 27th at 3:10am, and August 28th at 1:35am. Set the recorder – it’s worth it. Alternatively, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer for the next seven days.