To think the mismanagement of social and council housing is an absolute scandal?

[MistressoftheDarkSide]

https://news.sky.com/story/families-in-england-left-homeless-despite-33-000-empty-council-homes-13149141?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=discover&utm_campaign=CCwqGAgwKg8IACoHCAowwr36BjCtxzYw4JusAjC__94C&utm_content=bullets

Because surely it costs more to fork out on temporary accommodation in the long run? It's a ridiculous racket designed for profiteering.

Couldn’t agree more.

Councils and housing associations take taxpayer’s money and should be delivering services for the public good and provide good value for money. Instead, it’s chaos and bad management everywhere.

They have a statutory duty to safeguard the public money they’re given but it seems they only use this argument when they want to deny a vital service, otherwise it’s a splurge after a splurge (see the Birmingham council’s child transport private taxi cost scandal https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/birmingham-city-council-school-children-27940302).

It’s tempting to blame it all on the Tories since they’ve been in government for so long but the rot started before.

On the one hand yes the amount of money spent on accommodating people in temporary accommodation because there are no social homes to house them in IS a major national scandal. It is both leaving families living in insecure and often terribly unsuitable accommodation and bankrupting councils

However, I’m not sure the number of empty social homes is the right stick, or beating the right people.

For starters 33,000 is a pretty small number in the grand scheme of things, it’s less than 1% of social homes. That’s a lower rate of empty property than across housing in England in general (which itself has a low rate of empty property by international standards).

It doesn’t take account of regional differences in demand - there’s areas of the country with little demand for social housing and there’s areas with massive homeless problems. These don’t tend to coincide. Maybe you think people should be shipped off to wherever in the country the can get a roof over their head irrespective of where they work, where their kids go to school or where their connections are. But it’s hardly ideal is it?

And generally long term empty social housing will be empty for a fairly complicated reason / often because the cost of work needed to bring it up to a habitable standard is uneconomic, or the capital funding isn’t there to invest. In many cases the long term economic argument will stack up - just as long term, building new social housing will pay for itself and then some (as well as leading to better outcomes for the families who live i it than being stuck in temporary accommodation. That doesn’t mean that anyone is handing over the billions of pounds that is needed to fix the problem. As with many many aspects of of our public services and infrastructure hands are tied by economic short-termism.

Gets bingo card ready

Budge up a bit; I’m in, and I have my card and marker ready 😁

33 thousand empty social housing properties is a disgrace, despite it being a small percentage of the total properties.

Totally agree but i suspect there is an agenda to blame it on tenants here Its the way it always goes

The prime targets for such social engineering are council estates subject to large scale “regeneration” projects, another word that’s become heavily loaded. Again, some of the responsibility for this lies with New Labour. In 1998, Tony Blair launched the New Deal for Communities at the Aylesbury estate in south London. Today, the area is testimony to how housing policies dominated by private developers have reshaped working class communities and the role of HAs in this.

The Elephant and Castle neighbourhood is being physically, socially and ethnically transformed. This started with the demolition of the Heygate estate, a classic for stigmatised perceptions of council housing and the people who live in it. As the local 35% Campaign has meticulously documented, a succession of promises to Heygate residents were broken to arrive at a situation where 1,214 council homes were demolished, to be replaced with 2,704 new homes, of which only 82 (3%) are for social rent. The HA partner was London and Quadrant. To be eligible for the cheapest one-bedroom home built by them on the Heygate site, people needed a minimum household income of £57,500. The average household income in that part of Southwark is £24,324

From a 2019 thread

I’d be interested to know what numbers you consider to be the parameters for:

• A disgrace
• Unacceptably high
• Undesirably high
• To be expected given the profile of an aging social housing stock in which renovation and redevelopment operates in a continuous cycle.

Because I certainly don’t know the answer and I consider this a subject in which I am reasonably well informed.

Strapping in for the long haul.

I think that potential tenants should be shown these empty properties, even if they are not conventionally ready for letting. They may well be able/willing to do some work for themselves in return for a rent free period.
Of course I can’t give figures as to what would be acceptable as each property is individual in its needs. I will say that many years ago I worked in a council housing letting department so I have had insight into some of the situations arising. Some very understandable and some very strange happenings.

I live in London and what I find the most annoying is that there are buildings being propped up left right and centre. When I walk past they are empty. Sometimes it will be a year after they’ve finished the build and it still looks empty. A friend recently told me that they are in a new build, they’ve been there for a year and they barley have neighbours because the plata aren’t filled up.

I know that the private rent is ridiculously high. So why can’t council Ma work more with landlords to bring down the average price or create long term family homes

Ken Livingstone did this - it was the GLC Hard to Let Mobility Scheme. My boyfriend and I took one even though it was in terrible condition. We moved areas, we cleaned it thoroughly and painted all rooms including ceilings and woodwork. We begged, borrowed and bought second hand carpets for all the rooms, second hand curtains, and furniture. We fixed a broken windows and blocked sinks and made it into a really nice place to live. We left it in a much better state than we found it. It was good for us - we were young and working in London and good for the Council.

How can you be sure that 33,000 is “a disgrace” than?

And as per what a poster above has suggested, there may be scope for incentive schemes to deal with properties which are broadly lettable but undesirable, but I suspect there’s a not insignificant proportion that are not reasonably habitable at all - structural issues, chronic damp, unsafe heating etc etc.

Without much more info about the 33,000 properties, where they are and what condition they are in it’s very hard to judge what kind of problem it is and what the solution is. There’s so many underlying factors.

I keep reading that properties are being bought in London by overseas buyers, not for people to live in but for 'investment'.
I believe it was Turkey that said properties in their country could only be bought by people living there. I actually think they went further than this and the government basically took all the foreign owned properties back themselves.

I think it's all changing but it will take time. There seems to be an element of means testing going on. A family I know couldn't get on the council list as they both have OK jobs. Obv it will take a bit of time but when people are earning well they need to get out of social housing and into either private or buying. It's affordable for people with decent incomings. Wonder if they'll move people on if they start to earn more in th future

I feel the tenancy should be reviewed every 5 years or so and not a house for life. Too many people settle in to large council houses for life and we end up with older couples/widows in a 3 or 4 bedroom family home and single parents left living in the Travelodge.

My brother lives in a lovely large 3 bedroom council house in the nicest area where I live and his kids were all grown up and away 15 years ago. Absolute waste of a lovely family home and his low rent is being subsided by the tax payer.

Absolutely shocking and Jarvis happening to London. It is rich man’s playground now. I was born and grew up there but had to leave as priced out and Dd isn’t want to live in a bedsit with a child in the area I grew up in. It is a real sadness to see.

This should be a priority for any new government IMO, I live in Brighton and it is a very similar pattern now- outrageous!

No , we don't want an intelligent nuanced answer to why there are some empty housing when there are homeless families

We just want to bash the local authorities and say they are wasting money

First no on bingo card ticked off

The UK population has grown by 10,000,000 in my lifetime. Have we built 10,000,000 homes? No we haven’t. This is why we are in the shit. Can you blame the council for that? No you can’t. Can you blame the governments that let immigration go unchecked? Yes you can.

@NotSentFromIphone Why do tenants who dont even know those single parents owe them more than the childrens own fathers?

I feel like I'm psychic. I mentioned well-meaning amateurs giving their reckons about housing when they know nothing about it on another thread and here we are.

Yes, anyone who works in social housing and council housing is a wanker who cares naught for housing people or social good and does it for the ummmmmmmm not wages, not kudos, not thanks, not ease... I'm struggling.

Vacancy rates are complicated. MNers who have never worked in housing, nor done any real reading are best placed to critique them. [sarcasm]

Please inform yourselves about right to buy

A home is "empty" when an elderly tenant dies/gives it up for a care home after a couple of decades of turning down routine maintenance and the social landlord then has to go in and replace the kitchen and the bathroom and the utility meters and maybe the leak in the roof they never reported. Social landlords, especially the smaller ones without big in house teams, are subject to all the same inflation in materials costs and shortages of skilled labour as the rest of us are.

Yes social landlords should constantly be aiming for a faster turnaround between tenants, particularly now with the housing crisis so acute. But this is not happening in a vacuum. It would also be a scandal if they were moving people in to the condemned or mouldy buildings they can't afford to replace. Let's not blame councils for the government's deliberate decision not to invest in social housing.