The National Audit Office has produced a report on the New Homes Bonus. As might be expected the report focuses mainly on the aspect of incentivising the delivery of new homes, but it also covers the aspect of rewards for the re-occupation of empty homes.
Its key conclusions regarding empty homes are:
2.30 We found some evidence that the Bonus is incentivising local authorities to bring empty homes back into use....Around two thirds of the sample of 28 local authorities' empty homes strategies we reviewed refer to the Bonus as an incentive to bring empty homes back into use.
2.31 Local authorities cited examples of their actions to reduce the number of empty homes. For eample, they hvae protected the posts of empty homes officers who identify empty homes and plan how to bring them back into use. They suggested that these actions would not have occurred, and efforts to tackle empty homes would have been weaker, if the Bonus had not inlcuded payment for empty homes brought back into use
Nick Pritchard-Gordon of Reading Borough Council (and EHN Vice-Chair) and David Gibbens (EHN Policy Lead) met NAO staff as part of of the NAO exercise and it would seem that the key messages have been taken on board.A document circulated after that meeting is attached to this story.
It would have been preferable if the NAO had distinguished more clearly between the effects of the NHB as an incentive to enhance empty homes work compared with its ability to incentivise new housing development. The NAO is pretty critical of the quality of the evidence used to justify the NHB as an incentive for new housebuilding and also criticises a perceived lack of rigour in the attempt to monitor the outcome. Coupled with the blatant unfairness of the NHB in the context of different housing markets around the country, there are good reasons to believe that NHB would be ditched if there was a change of government. In that case empty homes work could suffer severely. Thus EHN needs to hightlight the value of the NHB for empty homes work to ensure that a suitable alternative is put in place if the NHB is scrapped.
The report also didn't cover the question of how local authorities monitor their own successes in bringing empties back into use (as opposed to the change in overall numbers of empties recorded via the council tax system). Insofar as the NAO is focused on national government rather than local government such an omission may be justifiable, and the NAO also focuses on the really big issues so that perhaps the issue of monitoring at local level was considered too trivial to mention. But it's still a disappointment.
Other points of interest include the highlighting of data cleansing as an issue:
"...some Bonus payements are for homes that were not really empty"
The report goes on to say that DCLG has
"successfully challenged the empty homes data for seven local authorities, resulting in reducing their Bonus allocations for 2013-14 by £1.7million total".
It is hard to see how data cleansing could be "challenged" and we will try and find out from DCLG what the circumstances were for those authorities involved.
Outside of these empty homes issues the report is pretty scathing about the quality of the evidence used to justify NHB as an incentive for new house building - echoing points made in EHN's consultation response when the measure was first announced. Monitoring of the impact since it was introduced is also considered weak. It is difficult to know whether the government ever believed its own propaganda on the likely impact of NHB. For anyone involved in the delivery of new housing at local authority level the assumptions made will always have seemed far-fetched. The NAO report underlines this whilst - as indicated above - making positive comments about the impact on empty homes initiatives.
In conlusion, the report contains much useful information for those interested in the New Homes Bonus. We have to hope that it doesn't lead to the baby being thrown out with the bath-water - the baby in this case being the positive impact the NHB has on work to reduce the number of empty homes.
You can access the report via our Library here.