Empty Homes Week – Practical Suggestions for Local Authorities

With Empty Homes week edging closer, the Empty Homes Network shares some practical advice for Local Authorities looking to expand their reach, exposure and engagement with empty home owners, complainants and the surrounding communities.

Internal Communications & Engagement

Providing an up-to-date picture of the empty homes figures locally to you, a Statistical Update presents a picture from which much of your communications and promotion of the service can be based on. This update can be broken down into total empty, long-term empty, numbers being charged the premium and unoccupied exemptions, or specific to the target market such as numbers within wards to promote empty homes work to elected members.

Promoting empty homes work to Colleagues within your organisation will not only bring them up to date with any new initiatives or tools, but also encourage them to share information and updates in relation to specific cases, or be the extra pair of eyes or ears that make the difference. Do the refuse collectors in your area know whether your priority cases have their waste collected, for example?

Promoting to and engaging Councillors and Elected Members during empty homes week can not only highlight the work you do to bring homes back into use, but can encourage the support and exposure of the work when it comes to a cabinet meeting or scrutiny committee later in the year. Carrying out Ward Walks to show the locations or discuss particular cases with councillors, can be useful in bringing them up to speed with cases in their respective wards.

Using your Council’s intranet, weekly newsletter or Staff Bulletin boards can also provide a great way or informing colleagues of your plans and initiatives for empty homes week, or about your work in general. Highlighting a particular case study, with some before and after photographs can be a great way of promoting your successes, as well as showing the work involved in bringing empty homes back into use.

External Communications

Guided by your Council Communications Team, engaging with all forms of media is a great way of promoting the service, sharing your success, and reaching out to empty homes owners and neighbours for information. Newspaper articles, radio and television are all useful in getting the message out, but these normally come as a result of press releases from the authority.

Social Media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can be a great way of compiling a targeted and mixed campaign, by sharing a success story on one day, and reaching out to owners the next. Daily posts/updates can spread the message quickly, and vary by who the intended target of the message is. Below is an example of how daily posts can be varied throughout empty homes week:

Monday: “Empty Homes in X: Statistical Update”

Tuesday: “Case Study & Success Story”

Wednesday: “Do you own an empty home in X?, We Can Help”

Thursday: “Case Study & Success Story”

Friday: “Know of an empty home in your area? Get in Touch”

As we move towards the time of year where Council Tax bills are published and posted to owners, using your local authority’s Council Tax Magazine or Newsletter, often sent with the annual charge letters, can be a great source of promotion. Speak to your revenue & benefits teams to see if you’re able to highlight your empty homes service on a page of the booklet.

As is often the case with Council websites, news updates or recent news stories are highlighted in a column or on a banner, so this could provide an opportunity to reach out to owners or the community and get your message to them.

Owner Engagement

Empty Homes Week can provide the ideal opportunity to carry out a targeted campaign of engagement with empty homes owners, through a mailshot or data cleanse. Contacting all owners to highlight your offer of support and services, especially in the current economic climate, could lead to the sort of interaction and engagement that is needed to move a case forward.

Not only can this campaign be targeted and positive, including future changes to legislation or council tax, could prompt a response. Informing an owner that their property is due to be liable for the premium in a month or two’s time, could be the catalyst for action, ie:

“I am writing to inform you that your property will become liable for the Empty Homes Premium charge as of the 1st April. Your annual bill will subsequently double, however, we have VAT letters available for refurbishment works, a new initiative, our loan scheme and lease options to assist in helping you avoid this…..”

Continuing to highlight the support through new or existing initiatives, loans and lease schemes, as well as the free advice and assistance on offer, will encourage owners and inform them that enforcement is not the only option available to the authority, in the pursuit of returning empty homes back into use.

Sharing your action or initiatives

Finally, The Empty Homes Network strongly encourages you to share your involvement in Empty Homes Week with Action on Empty Homes. Annually, the organisation promotes and lobbies for additional measures to assist in councils returning properties to use, and the more they can show that authorities across the country are actively involved in this work, the more their voice can be heard when pushing for an increased awareness of the issue from central government.

Empty Homes Week takes place from 27th February to the 5th March, and is promoted by Action on Empty Homes. For more information, visit www.actiononemptyhomes.org