Below is the text of NAEPP's letter to the Guardian following their two-page spread on Monday 5th April
"Dear Sir or Madam
"Your special report on empty homes (Monday 22nd) was a useful reminder of a problem that everyone seems to be concerned about but few seem to have answers for. The headline-grabbing approaches offered by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats involve short-term spending sprees to buy up empty properties. Unfortunately, such measures would do little more than fuel the continuing house-price bubble by adding to demand when supply is limited. Actually, if empty houses are for sale at the right price in the current market, then they will sell: there is no need to pump in public money to get them occupied. And if they are not for sale, what is the point in dishing out hundreds of millions of pounds to buy them?
"Your case studies usefully highlight the reality: dealing with long-term empties is hard work and there are no easy solutions. What is really needed is not short-term measures but some sustained leadership at national level to support and enhance the patchy and sometime faltering work being undertaken by local authorities, to gradually but systematically plug the holes that make delivery on this issue difficult. The current lack of ownership by central government is indicated by the unsatisfactory nature of the statistics. But the real scandal here was not picked up by your article. Every year, to prepare its Housing Strategy Statistical Appendix return, each of the 300+ housing authorities in the country has to go through the tedious process of contacting every public body in its area in order to produce figures for “Other Public Sector” vacant dwellings. That is how disengaged central government is from the issue: it does not even require its own agencies to take the routine step of collecting and reporting back numbers of empty dwellings directly to it. Instead it wastes a significant amount of local authority time to collect the information indirectly—and without even finding out which agencies the vacant dwellings belong to.
"On a more positive note, both Conservative and Labour administrations can take credit for the long-term success of the Rough Sleepers Initiative where central government set up effective partnerships with local authorities to tackle street homelessness. What is needed now is the creation of a national Empty Homes Initiative to begin a similar sustained campaign to deal with empty homes, as proposed in our paper From empty promise to national initiative (www.naepp.org.uk/NationalActionPlanFinal ). We also describe the practical measures that such an initiative should explore. The transfer of a trivial proportion of the investment currently targeted at new-build would make such an initiative cost-neutral in capital terms, with the added advantage that expenditure on refurbishment would go straight into the real economy. Unless they contain proposals for such a sustatined, co-ordinated and thorough-going response, any policies to tackle empty homes put forward by parties at the forthcoming election should be treated as distinctly half-baked. "
ENDS