I’m not really a fan of award ceremonies to be honest, for the obvious and bitter reason that I’ve never won any of them or even been nominated. But there is one ceremony I thoroughly approve of and you might as well when you discover how it could affect you, or your street, or your community.
The awards are the 11th Scottish Empty Homes Awards which recognise the work of individuals and groups who have revitalised empty homes. The finalists have just been announced and they cover almost every part of the country.
It matters for an obvious reason: we have a housing challenge in the UK – people who can’t find a home, or can’t afford one, or are living in one that isn’t right for them – and yet we have many thousands of houses lying empty.
Organisations like The Scottish Empty Homes Partnership and Action on Empty Homes are trying to do something about it, although the problems can be different in different parts of the country. In London for example one of the issues is wealthy people buying houses as an investment and leaving them empty whereas in poorer areas the problem can be people moving out and properties being left to waste away.
But what adds to the crisis is we do not have an efficient system for tackling it. Groups like the Empty Homes Partnership encourage councils to have officers who can focus on fixing the problem but many don’t. To make matters worse, some councils have numerous empty council houses because they insist on the old-fashioned system of waiting lists and take-it-or-leave rather than putting houses out for bids, which would be preferable. The official term for it “choice-based letting”.
I’ve also seen the problems for myself in my own community. In 2003, I bought an old building in Ayrshire and converted it into a modern house but the planning department seemed resistant rather than helpful. There are other empty buildings in the village nearby, which have lain neglected for years largely because the owners are expecting far too high a price. It’s also been frustrating to see new housing estates go up in the area while the old buildings continue to lie empty.
In the case of my community, some solutions have been found, mostly through local action groups (the community has bought the local hotel for instance). Charitable money has also helped – some houses in the area have been renovated by the Prince’s Foundation. But the bigger problem is unlikely to be solved until the law is changed.
Firstly, every council in the country could be legally required to have at least one officer dedicated to reducing the number of empty properties in their area. Councils should also have greater powers to increase the tax on private homes that are persistently empty; there should be a cost to leaving a house empty for no good reason.
The issue of planning also needs fixed. What happens currently is a building firm will buy a plot and put up new homes even though there are already buildings in the area that are lying empty. It can lead to lop-sided communities that are both derelict and old and shiny and new at the same time.
The answer – and building firms won’t like this because putting up new kit houses is cheap – is to require any firm that seeks to build new homes to undertake to also convert a proportion of the empty homes that are already in the community and market them for sale or rent along with the new ones. It’ll cost more but it will also improve communities and attract more people to come and live in them.
I have seen the effect myself, in a small way, in my own home. You may have read about my place in the Scottish Book of Ghosts – it is reputedly haunted – but there are no ghosts in the building for me, only the comfort and joy of seeing it brought back to life. It felt like something I could do for the building when I bought it all those years ago. And now the building is returning the favour every day.
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