Government promises more powers for councils to reclaim empty homes
The government has said it will “strengthen the powers of local councils” to take over the management of vacant residential premises after a campaign by Westminster City Council.
The central London local authority has called on the government to make it easier to issue Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs) to properties that have been empty for six months.
EDMOs effectively bring empty private sector properties under local council control. A council cannot issue an EDMO without first getting approval from an independent property tribunal.
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Adam Hug, leader of Westminster City Council, said: “Reducing the EDMO qualifying period to six months would ensure more homes are available to meet local housing needs.”
He made the remarks on behalf of the Local Government Association, which launched a new toolkit “to support empty-homes officers” last month, having found that the number of long-term empty homes nationally had increased by nearly 10% over the past five years.
Westminster City Council said it had spent £140m over two years on temporary accommodation, while at least 11,000 properties in the local authority stood empty.
Mr Hug told the BBC: “We’re looking for the government to help reform the Empty Dwelling Management Order system and a number of other changes to help local councils and their empty-property officers have those productive conversations with landowners to bring properties into use.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government told Inside Housing: “We are determined to fix the housing crisis we have inherited, and know that too many empty homes in an area can place a burden on local communities by stopping local people from getting homes, attracting anti-social behaviour and damaging local services by increasing costs for councils.
“That’s why we will support councils to tackle empty homes by strengthening their powers to take over the management of vacant residential premises.”
In December, a cross-party group of MPs, peers and housing organisations wrote to Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, calling on the government to introduce a “national empty homes strategy” to bring “large-scale” numbers of properties back into use.
The group highlighted that, at the time, 265,000 homes in England had been vacant for over six months, while more than 123,000 homeless households were in temporary accommodation.
Additional research in February revealed that the social housing sector spent more than £1bn on empty properties in 2023-24.
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