Empty Homes Report for the year ended 31st March 2012
The Management Committee submits its annual report and the financial statements of Empty Homes Agency Limited for the year ended 31 March 2012. The Management Committee confirms that the annual report and financial statements comply with current statutory requirements, the requirements of the Agency's governing document and the provisions of the Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) 'Accounting and Reporting by Charities (revised 2005)'. The charity uses the operating name Empty Homes.
Our Mission and Objectives
Empty Homes helps people and organisations create homes from empty property and campaigns for more empty homes to be brought into use for the benefit of all those in housing need. We act as a campaigning voice for those who need homes and those dismayed at the thousands of homes left empty and abandoned. Empty Homes aims to deliver:
· Help: We offer practical advice and assistance, so that people and communities can create new homes by bringing empty properties back to life
· Challenge: We campaign to ensure that those in power and those who own property make empty homes available to people who need homes,
· Knowledge: We undertake research to provide facts and evidence to help people, and to make sure our campaigns are targeted.
· Enterprise: We strive to get the maximum from all funding we receive, working with others who share our aim of creating new homes from empty property.
Achievements and Performance
Long-term impact
2011/12 was one of the most successful in the charity’s history. But our impact over the long term has been even more significant. We believe that our work has caused important changes in legislation, taxation, and funding that have radically altered the way the issue is tackled. Since our establishment in 1992 there are 100,000 fewer empty homes in England. The homes that this has created provide housing for approximately a quarter of a million people. Since we were established our major achievements have included:
· Successfully campaigning for a government empty homes programme that offers funds and rewards for getting empty homes re-occupied
· Ensuring that every council in England has a named person responsible for getting empty homes back into use,
· Successfully campaigning for tax incentives for owners of empty homes who brought them back into use, and
· Successfully campaigning for proper powers for Councils to deal with long-term empty homes.
A Call to Action
Challenging the status quo and campaigning for action has always been at the heart of what we do. We aim to make the public, and decision makers, aware of both the scale of the empty homes problem and the potential benefits of resolving it. This year we helped bring the issue to its widest ever audience and helped bring together the greatest ever public support for action on empty homes.
Empty Homes has inspired and helped develop many TV programmes on the issue of empty homes. 2011/12 saw the broadcast of the third series of the BBC1 TV series “Britain’s Empty Homes” which we contributed to and advised on. We also publicised our message for action on empty homes with numerous and frequent appearances and interviews on national and local radio and TV including BBC breakfast TV, BBC TV news, Sky News, ITV news, Radio 4’s Today programme and the You and Yours programme.
2011 saw the launch of the Great British Property Scandal campaign. The campaign, which we helped devise, was led by architect and TV presenter George Clarke and centred on a prime time TV series, broadcast on Channel 4 in November and December 2011 for which we were advisors.
Case Study
Carl was the subject of one of the stories featured on the Great British Property Scandal. He is an ex soldier who served in Iraq until 2007, but was discharged from the army shortly afterwards suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He is on the councils’ housing waiting list, but is not considered a high priority case. As a result he lives on his Mum’s sofa with his five year old son.
Despite the council saying there is nowhere for him to live, his hometown of Gateshead has over 4,000 empty homes. Carl explained that he has building skills and would happily help do up an empty house if he could live in it.
The series presented by George Clarke, Phil Spencer, Jon Snow and Kevin McCloud highlighted examples of the scandalous waste of empty housing, and demonstrated ways in which empty homes could be returned to affordable use.
The series reached more than three million viewers an episode, and the campaign’s petition calling for government action on empty homes was signed by 118,000 people, making it the best supported housing campaign on British TV.
To support the campaign we adapted our Report Empty Homes website so that it could be hosted by Channel 4 for the duration of the campaign. The extra exposure this created caused over 3,000 new reports to be made through the website.
We are delighted that a new Great British Property Scandal TV programme will be broadcast in the autumn of 2012.
Campaigning success
Bringing empty homes into use is a political as well as a practical issue. People and communities working to create affordable homes from empty property face difficulties and obstacles. Often these are caused by policies, rules, or funding regimes imposed at a national level. Working with and listening to local communities, we identify these problems and campaign and lobby for change.
This year was highly successful, with a large proportion of our campaign agenda achieved. The highlights of that success were:
· The Government introduced a major empty homes grant program providing funding for councils, housing associations and community groups. This had long been one of our important campaign aims, introducing for the first time specific public funding to help get empty homes into affordable use. The program of course needs to be seen in the context of a large overall reduction in government funding for housing. But it is significant that empty homes was the only area of government funding on housing to see growth.
· We campaigned for rewards for councils to get empty homes into use. Our campaign initially focused on the Housing and Planning Delivery Grant, but when this was scrapped we applied our campaign to its replacement, the New Homes Bonus. This scheme rewards councils when new homes are built. We thought it perverse and potentially damaging if existing empty homes returned to use were not treated in the same way. The rules were changed and now councils are rewarded when there is a drop in the number of empty homes in their area.
The effect of these changes is palpable. Significant numbers of new empty homes programmes are being started by councils, housing associations and community groups across England. The level of activity is perhaps higher than it has ever been. Schemes range from a programme by an international NGO to bring 35 empty properties in London into affordable use, to a £5million programme across Greater Manchester that will see nearly 500 empty house renovated and returned to use. Activity is increasing in every part of England.
Exposing the Truth
To inform the debate on empty homes we publish facts and evidence, and carry out research. Every year we publish annual statistics on the numbers of empty homes in every part of England on a local, regional and national level. These statistics are sourced from various government data releases. We quality check the data, and where information is missing or appears incorrect we carry out our own research to obtain the correct information. Through this process we were able to demonstrate in 2010 that what government ministers had claimed as a drop in the number of empty homes was simply due to missing data and in fact the number had increased.
This year we became very concerned by a government programme called the Housing Market Renewal Transition fund. This £30 million fund had been introduced to help local authorities wind down their activities as part of the withdrawal of the Housing Market Renewal Programme. We were alerted that the fund was being used for a different purpose to what was being reported. We obtained information about every successful bid and discovered that far from winding down activity the fund was being used effectively to restart it, and fund a large housing clearance programme with little prospect of new houses being built. Our evidence showed that grant was being claimed for demolishing 5,125 empty houses, renovating 113 and building none. We presented our evidence to ministers and the story was covered extensively in the media. As a result the charity SAVE Britain’s Heritage, who shared our concerns, obtained a judicial review that temporarily suspended the fund. Ministers established an Empty Homes Review group with an independent chair to investigate and recommend changes. The results of the review have yet to be published, but they are expected to be radical.
Homesteading
We are convinced that the parlous state of the housing market in some parts of England requires radical measures to be taken to ensure that high levels of vacancy and abandonment do not occur This year we have been advocating and encouraging the use of homesteading as a way of reversing decline and providing low-cost housing.
The principle behind homesteading is that abandoned publicly owned homes are offered at a discount or even given away conditional on the new owner living in the property as their sole home and renovating it. The principle has been used extensively in the USA and the Netherlands and was also adopted successfully in the UK in the past. In these cases new people moving into the area helped reverse the decline, and homesteading also provided low cost housing to those who would otherwise not have been able to afford it.
Drawing on the experience in the Netherlands we have developed new financial models for homesteading and have helped several councils develop homesteading programmes. We successfully persuaded government to allow homesteading programmes to be eligible to apply for grant under the government’s new empty homes grant programme.
Case Study
Empty Homes helped Stoke-on-Trent Council develop a homesteading programme for an area of the city with a very high vacancy rate that had previously been condemned for demolition.
In the programme the council will offer families empty homes for £1, and then offer loans of up to £30,000 to pay for renovation works. The families would then be expected to make the houses their primary home. The loans would be paid back over a period of time and recycled to use on other properties.
Similar loans would also be available to existing owners of long-term empty homes in the area with the aim that all of the empty homes in the area will be brought back into use.
Funding for the loans would come from a £1.5 million government grant that Empty Homes helped the council secure.
In 2012 we have ourselves begun a homesteading programme on a terrace of houses in Stoke-on-Trent (unrelated to the above case study). We have been successful in obtaining grant funding and persuading the council to release the properties to allow a homesteading scheme to go ahead. We are working with the Prince’s Regeneration Trust and Midland Heart housing association to develop the project. Our aim is to demonstrate a new form of homesteading that results in shared ownership, thus making homesteading available to a different group of people.
Action on individual empty homes
We periodically work on individual empty properties of major public concern where the local authority is unable or unwilling to act. This year we can report success on several of the projects we worked on during the year.
· Windsor Walk in Denmark Hill, South London where 16 houses owned by the hospital were left vacant. In 2011 half of the houses were sold and are currently being refurbished.
· The Ferrier Estate in Kidbroke South London, where over 1,000 flats were left empty has now been demolished and new homes are beginning to be built.
· Hall Mead Close in Bugbroke Northamptonshire where 6 homes had remained empty for 18 years was fully refurbished and the houses were sold in 2012.
Case Study
In the early 1970s hundreds of homes along a 2km section of the North Circular Road in London were compulsory purchased and emptied out by the Department of Transport. The plan was for demolition for a road-widening scheme; but it never happened. 40 years later the houses were still empty, some were squatted others fell into disrepair and complete dereliction. For four decades the North Circular Road was London’s biggest empty homes blackspot.
In the 2008 London mayoral election campaign Empty Homes ran a mayoral challenge. It met the candidates and proposed an empty homes action plan for London, a major part of which was the sale and reoccupation of the North Circular Road houses. The successful candidate Boris Johnson responded and set out a commitment to resolve the problem in his housing manifesto. In 2010 the mayor brought together Transport for London the Homes and Communities Agency and the Council and brokered a sale of the houses to housing association Notting Hill Housing Trust. This year, work on the houses started. When complete in 2015 all 79 empty houses will be returned to use and many more new houses built on vacant land around the site.
Future Plans:
Empty Homes has exciting plans to develop the work it started in 2011/12. It is of great importance to us that the huge increase in empty homes projects and renovations taking place now is sustained and does not reduce when government grants are no longer available. To help achieve this we are devoting our 2012 conference to non-grant funded projects that will start next year, and will seek to support and promote them over the year.