Responses to EHN’s Freedom of Information request from 2013 show about 300 Full-time Equivalent (FTE) staff working on empty homes at councils around England – less than one for each of the 326 housing authorities.
Of the 300, it was possible to identify 120 full-time equivalent posts that featured the word “Empty” in the job titles. This included posts such as “Housing Improvement Officer – Empty Homes”. It was not certain in such cases whether “Empty “ was part of the official job title or not. The total FTE where the word “Empty” seemed to be integral to the job title was 104.
How many local authorities?
Looking at numbers of local authorities rather than the total of FTE staff, less than a third (98) had staff with “Empty” in the job-title; and in only 92 cases did it seem to be integral. When the National Association of Empty Property Practitioners (the previous incarnation of EHN) was officially launched in 2001 it had 80 members: this suggests that the notion of empty homes work as a recognisable profession in its own right has not made a huge amount of headway in the intervening period. Nevertheless, the growth of the Empty Homes Network to over 500 individual members, of whom probably three-quarters work for local authorities, indicates that the need to engage with empty homes is certainly more widely recognised than it was 12 years ago.
In total, 251 local authorities responded with evidence about the staff resource employed on empty homes work. Of those, 27 authorities were not able to identify any resources working on empty homes. Reality is not quite as tidy as this of course: some authorities did not reply but are known to employ empty homes staff. Other responses were ambiguous and our estimates in those cases may be wrong.
Permanent versus temporary
A significant proportion of the FTE employees (55 FTE) were not permanent staff, being either agency, on temporary contracts, or seconded from other areas . This seemed to apply particularly to those whose job titles included the word “Empty”. This suggests that 20 years on from the first wave of empty homes officers being employed, their work remains all too marginal. In fact no fewer than 73 authorities indicated that some of the staff reported to be working to bring empties back to use were “temporary” in some shape or form.
Reliability of data
The quality of data was variable. Some authorities had gone to great lengths to quantify the amount of time spent by different roles on empty homes work – particularly where there were no dedicated staff. On the other hand, a small minority paid little attention to the exact wording of the question, for example simply listing all the staff in their private sector housing teams. It was sometimes necessary to draw on inside knowledge to arrive at the correct interpretation. But this said, for the most part the answers seem to have been thought about carefully.
Full Members (you’ll need to be logged in) can access the full set of results in the spreadsheet in our library here.
New Homes Bonus
Our FOI request also asked whether any New Homes Bonus was hypothecated to tackling empty homes. Only 47 authorities did hypothecate New Homes Bonus in this way, but many others pointed out that they were nevertheless spending money from their central budgets on empty homes and/or that, in principle, they did not hypothecate NHB.
Given the financial regime within which New Homes Bonus sits whereby most of the Bonus—indeed all of it in some cases—is actually doing no more than making up the shortfall in Revenue Support Grant created by the top-slice that feeds the NHB pot In the first place, it is possible to respect a council’s unwillingness to treat NHB as a genuine “bonus” that should be carefully apportioned to deserving cases. Tying empty homes posts to NHB has risks attached and EHN remains strongly committed to emphasising the value of the work of empty homes practitioners regardless of how much New Homes Bonus is generated and the need for more focused ways of measuring local authorities’ work to bring empty homes back into use, as exemplified by our guidance on monitoring of interventions (this is accessible to anyone).
Where specific comments were made about the use of New Homes Bonus, these have been included in the results spreadsheet, but we have not included all the general comments received which for example outline the nature of the NHB regime.
Prudential Borrowing
A final question in our FOI request sought information about the scope local authorities had for prudential borrowing. Prudential borrowing has the potential to provide capital funding for empty homes work. Local authorities can, or possibly are supposed to, provide details about their headroom for prudential borrowing which is assessed based on technical accounting rules that are well beyond our capacity to understand or explain. But an exciting session from Dave Cowley of Warrington MBC at the 2013 Conference suggested that prudential Borrowing offers real opportunities.
This question produced a mixed back of responses. Quite a number of authorities said they were debt-free, did not intend to borrow, and therefore the prudential indicator involved was not relevant to them. Some authorities seemed to treat the question as one about freedom to borrow following the HRA reform (we don’t think these necessarily interact).
Extracting the answers systematically from the various responses (many offered links to detailed accounting reports) was a bigger job than seemed worthwhile to take on and the answers are not included in the published spreadsheet. But where clear answers were provided, the scope for prudential borrowing seemed to be huge, running into tens of millions of pounds in most cases.
The challenge is to get local authority finance directors to take the potential seriously enough in the context of what, by prudential borrowing standards, would be small amounts of money.
Next steps
We will shortly be submitting a further FOI request to help us update our picture of the local authority empty homes practitioner world.