Communities Minister Andrew Stunell has described the 300,000 long term empty homes in England as a scandal - with four million people stranded on housing waiting lists. He said that if the empty properties were occupied by average sized families, around 700,000 more people could have a home of their own.
Mr Stunell called on communities to step up work to tackle the problem by making use of help and support from the Government. Communities stand to benefit by over £2 billion if all long-term empty properties were brought back into use, with the New Homes Bonus paying out £7,000 for the average empty property.
The Minister also encouraged areas to back what he described as 'win-win' schemes - pioneering projects like the Canopy Housing Project in Leeds, where homeless people are given training opportunities and a roof over their heads while they help bring empty properties back into use. The local area then receives Government cash for each refurbished home.
On top of this, the Government has made a £100 million fund available to bring empty properties back into use, and expressions of interest to bid for projects on are currently being considered.
The Minister was speaking to local experts from councils, housing associations and charities, that he had brought together as part of a week of intensive action to step up work across the country to tackle the empty homes problem.
Planned initiatives include a new toolkit providing advice on how to bring properties back into use and a new on-line mapping tool that will help areas identify homes that are empty.
[KF] The Government launched two new online toolkits to help local councils and communities better identify the empty homes in their area and bring them back into use.
The mapping toolkit will also include information on the surroundings of empty homes, such as levels of housing needs, numbers of households in temporary accommodation, housing stock by tenure, households on waiting lists, local housing allowance levels, crime, arson, antisocial behaviour data and data on local socio-economic indices - allowing councils to prioritise areas in need of attention.
Both toolkits can be found on the Homes and Communities Agency website.
The knowledge toolkit is available to everyone, and the online mapping toolkit to all local authority and central government partners who are covered by the Public Sector mapping Agreement. [KF]
New Online Toolkits to Tackle Problem of Empty Homes
Both toolkits can be found on the Homes and Communities Agency website.
Housing Minister Grant Shapps announced that the Government will help more people to build their own home.
Speaking at Grand Designs Live 2011, the Housing Minister said that he wanted self build to become a mainstream housing option. He also re-affirmed that Government would play its part by making available publicly owned land for use by ordinary people to build their own homes.
As a group, self-builders are already Britain's largest housebuilder, accounting for about one in five new homes each year. However, barriers and red tape have led to the UK having one of the lowest proportions of new homes built by self-builders in Europe.
Mr Shapps said he wanted to see more land being made available - both private and public - to enable more individual and community self build schemes. He called on private investors to bring forward plots, and for local authorities and housing associations to show their support.
The Minister said the Government would lead the way and he will shortly announce the first publicly-owned sites to be made available to housebuilders to include plots exclusively for self-builders.
This will be part of wider Government measures announced in the Budget to increase the amount of land made available for housebuilding, including to self-builders, which the Minister hopes will bring self-building into the mainstream and stop it being "the preserve of the privileged few".