Tameside Council has recently completed a two year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) in collaboration with the University of Salford. The KTP set out to explore the reasons for empty ownership in the borough. Instead of concentrating exclusively on the physical and geographical nature of the empty homes , our research attempted, where possible, to focus on this social phenomenon from the perspective of the empty home owner. Our hypothesis was that if we could understand in more detail the real world experiences that owners face in owning an empty home and their attempts at bringing their homes back into use, then perhaps owners themselves can actually become the real agents for change in this vastly overlooked area of housing policy.
In 2014 one of the associated pieces of research, written by Danielle Butler from the University of Salford, was awarded the prestigious Jonathon Sime Award, which recognises a significant contribution in the field of people-environment research in an under graduate dissertation. The abstract for her research, Understanding Inertia: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of the Experiences of Owning an Empty Home can be found here http://www.surrey.ac.uk/psychology/about/jsa/2014/index.htm.
Any comments or feedback are most welcome: please contact Jim Davies, Housing Renewal Manager, at Tameside MBC