390 Council houses stand empty in Southampton.

[caringcarer]

At a time when there is a national shortage of rental houses this seems far too many standing around empty while council makes tenants go into temporary accommodation. It's not acceptable. They should take on more trades to bring them.back into use more quickly. It must be a lazy council that is not proactive in keeping on top of its housing repairs. I wonder what the numbers are like for other councils.

Most councils have only got money to pay for social care and nothing else now. It's gonna get a lot worse if anything

Southampton council owns and manages 18,000 homes so you are talking about a vacancy rate of 2%. I would expect a constantly-churning vacancy rate of about this level as it takes time to refurbish and repair properties between tenants. The process of assessing a property for what needs to be done, deciding what can be afforded within budget if some of the work is desirable but not safety-critical, scheduling the work and getting it carried out and signed off will always take a while and it's not a sensible use of resources to have a large team that can turn this all around at lightning speed as each property comes up - it's more cost effective to commission a contract to replace 50 roofs that need replacing/install 50 kitchens rather than commissioning them piecemeal so sometimes a few extra months vacancy to wait for an opportunity for a volume order would be sensible.

Why don't the council offer these house out to folk on the understanding that the people fix the houses by learning a trade.
Our local council did something similar.
Fed up of tenants asking for basic repairs.
So offered them a basic course on how to do such repairs at college.
It actually saved the council money in the long run.
And yes i understand councils are broke
But they need to seriously look at why their broke

At a time when councils are paying eye watering bills to hotels for temporary accommodation it does seem like it's not thought out very well to have these houses empty.

They're broke because they've had millions cut from their budgets?

lordslibrary.parliament.uk/local-government-finances-impact-on-communities/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20NAO%2C%20total,%2F11%20and%202020%2F21.

Saying that there are 390 council houses vacant is pretty meaningless without some context. As somebody else has pointed out this is a void rate of approximately 2%, which is not unreasonable. People will be moving out or moving on constantly and properties need to be re-let. This figure also says nothing about how long the properties have been vacant for - were the keys handed back yesterday or are they long term vacancies? I would suspect a mixture of both. Some properties will have been returned in very poor condition and will need fairly major repairs. Don’t forget that we have an aging stock of council housing, some over 100 years old and though most properties will have been maintained and refurbished recently some of them will be needing major cyclical repairs. There are also likely to be some properties, albeit a small number damaged by fire, flood, or other accidents.

A substantial proportion of the better homes will have been sold under the RtB with Councils not permitted to build new properties for many years. This has meant that increasingly councils are left with a higher proportion of the older, harder to maintain stock together with an increasing proportion of more vulnerable tenants.

The suggestion that all council tenants will be capable of repairing and maintaining their homes, even with training is, quite frankly, a recipe for disaster in many cases, though for others it will be a great idea.

Where I live the slow turnaround is due to lack of staff due to cut backs. These people would be doing repair reports ready for the work to be done to enable housing to pass the property onto a qualifying tenant. This information came from someone I know within housing. One house has been empty of over a year now, it’s criminal!

These are all long term vacant. The majority have been vacant for over 200 days.

Because a lot of the time if a house is empty for longer than the admin time needed to reallocate it its because it needs significant work, not basic DIY skills?
They aren't not renting it out because it needs a new shelf putting up or a wall painted.

When is the average working person going to get the time to go on a trade skills course?

If its anything other than basic skills then the person will be learning for years - you can't pick up plumbing or roofing or electrical rewiring on a 2 day course! What will happen to the house during the 2-5 years the person is learning the skills? Will the council also pay the persons living expenses while they are learning these skills -if so what a waste of time and money if the person only fixes their own house and then goes back to work in a call center!!

It would also be discriminatory - someone disabled or elderly or pregnant or with small kids or who doesn't speak English might not be able to do the skills training so they would get pushed down to the back of the queue, which would be illegal.

Also what happens if someone gets injured fixing up this house after a minimum of training " Well i was only doing it because the council told me I'd be homeless if I didn't fix the roof myself!" = lawsuit!

What if the previous tenant "fixes" an issue but does a terrible job and then a new person moves in and gets injured = lawsuit!

Where I live all Council housing stock has been transferred to housing associations and it’s the same…multiple empty houses, it’s shocking

You don't know the condition, they may not meet current codes so are undergoing major renovation