The story of an empty home

The story of John P. Houghton’s empty childhood home ended happily – after many years. It shouldn’t take so long to get the UK’s empty homes occupied again, he says.

In February 2011, I blogged for New Start about the sorry state of my childhood home in Kirkby, Merseyside. I had lived in the house from the age of 7 to 18, between 1985 and 1996, when my family moved out and I left for university.

As a regeneration professional who has worked in the poorest neighbourhoods in the country, empty and vandalised homes are a sadly commonplace sight. That didn’t, however, alter the shock of seeing my old home in such a sorry state.

This is the house where I listened to my first album, where my mum danced me a jig around the kitchen when I got into university, where I wept for my grandfather who died very suddenly, where I had watched the defining political and cultural moments of the 1980s and 1990s play out on the small black-and-white TV in my now vandalised bedroom.

What had happened?

Some local digging around unearthed a familiar story. The house had been bought up in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the great crash, but was left empty by the new absentee owner. Over the months of 2010, it was progressively vandalised, until all the windows and doors had been broken and the insides had been thoroughly gutted.

The local authority, Knowsley Council, made several attempts to intervene during this time. These were either rejected by the owner or thwarted by funding cuts. Reductions to the Homes and Community Agency budget derailed a deal that would have seen the local housing agency, Knowsley Housing Trust, buy the property outright.

With these options shut down, the council categorised the house as a ‘problematic’ case in 2011 due to the lack of cooperation from the owner and initiated a costly set of measures to manage the situation as best it could. This included regular inspections and legal proceedings against the owner, CCTV installation, clearing dumped rubbish and graffiti removal, ongoing repairs and, eventually, total refurbishment.

While this was happening, The Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty accompanied me on a trip back home to see the damage for himself:

‘Knocked about during the successive recessions of the 80s and 90s, Kirkby barely got a whiff of the boom. Mind you, it did get some of the worst bits of the property bubble. I used to associate property speculation with rows of yuppie flats: I now know that it can come in far more prosaic forms,’ he wrote.

As he explained, my old house was not an isolated incident, but one symptom of a wider malaise. This was the collapse of ‘an entire model of economic development: one driven by debt and speculation, and which ignored the need for productive industry’.

Many sacred shibboleths of economic and fiscal were sacrificed in the aftermath of the crisis that Chakrabortty chronicled here and elsewhere. Emergency situations demanded emergency measures, as banks threatened to go under, businesses shrank and families lost their homes.

Yet when it came to empty homes, the coalition government made the situation worse by increasing the length of time a house needed to be empty before a council could take action, from six months to two years. This strengthened the rights of individual owners at the cost of wider community security and housing market resilience.

Knowsley Council was awarded a long-term ‘empty dwelling management order’ in mid-2015. This gave the council wider powers to restore the property and return it to market. The order lasts until 2022, with the option of a further seven-year extension.

The council estimates the total cost of repairs and legal proceedings are up to £25,000. It intends to recoup these costs from rental income over time, but it still represents an unnecessary outgoing at a time of extreme pressure on council finances.

In June 2016, new tenants finally moved in. The first for seven years. My old house is now a home for someone else. Yet while there is a happy ending to this story, we still need to improve how we deal with empty homes.

Evidently, the process is still too costly and onerous for local authorities. Empty dwelling management orders have been available to local authorities since 2006. Knowsley is the only council in the entire Merseyside sub-region to have used one.

Despite increasing the length of time before action can be taken, from six months to two years, the government has introduced a number of more positive measures, often in response to the campaigning work of the charity Empty Homes.

These include financial incentives to tackling empty homes through the New Homes Bonus, the partial removal of council tax discounts on empty homes, and the formation of a dedicated empty homes programme between 2011 and 2015.

This latter measure demonstrated that ‘creating homes from empty properties saves substantial amounts of material compared to new houses, and also minimises the amount of land used for development’.

A faster, firmer approach would first involve the introduction of a ‘responsibility to maintain’ on landlords. This would require them to ensure the property is being maintained to a standard that does not negatively affected the appeal of the wider area or value of surrounding properties.

Where this is not the case, the government should reverse its earlier reform and bring back down to six months the period at which local authorities can take action. It should also make it easier for councils to proceed, if the owner does not attend court hearings or generally cooperate with legal proceedings, and recover the subsequent costs.

These measures would make it easier for local authorities to bring 200,000 existing properties back into use, giving homeless and overcrowded households the chance of a new life, and dealing with the dereliction and neglect that blights neighbourhoods across the country.