Eric Pickles gave a written statement on Monday 10th October 2011, reported in Hansard, which covers the work of his Department and includes the following text relating to empty homes:
On £100m and Empty Homes Premium
Tackling the 700,000 empty homes across the country is a top priority for my Department. On 20 September, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell), announced more powers for community groups to bring empty homes back into use. Community and voluntary organisations will be able to bid for a part of £100 million of Government funding for pioneering housing schemes that will ensure empty properties are lived in again. This will also help to provide more affordable housing. The coalition Government are already providing more incentives for councils to bring empty homes back into use, including them in the new homes bonus. In one year of the new homes bonus just under 16,000 previously empty properties have been brought back into use.
My Department will also consult in due course on plans to allow councils local discretion to introduce a council tax premium on homes in their area that have been empty for more than two years, to provide a stronger incentive to get the homes back into productive use and remove the blight from such properties on local neighbourhoods.
On surplus public buildings and Prods
The Government are also moving ahead with plans to release disused public land and empty offices with enough capacity to build up to 100,000 new homes by 2015. On 5 October, four Departments with significant landholdings published their strategies that set out how their formerly used land and property has the capacity to deliver more than 50,000 desperately needed new homes.
Over the summer these departments have moved swiftly to identify land and property that could be released for new development. This builds on the 11,000 housing starts that will be achieved through the release of land owned by the Homes and Communities Agency. The amount of previously-developed land owned by the public sector is more than twice the size of Leicester, and its development could support as many as 200,000 construction and related jobs.
At the same time, my right hon. Friend, the Minister for Housing and Local Government announced fresh steps to help communities across the country reclaim and develop hundreds of acres of unused public sector land and buildings, which could be used to deliver the schemes communities want to see in their areas. Members of the public will now be able to request a sale of public land and buildings by filling in a simple and user-friendly form. It will replace a system that is so obscure and restrictive that it has hardly ever been used, with only one successful application in the past 13 years.
There was no mention of Eric Pickles' own personal contributon to the empty homes issue, ie the proposed changes to the Empty Dwelling Management Order legislation.