State of the Nation 2016 - People

As the dust starts to settle after Empty Homes Week, it is time to take stock of where the empty homes world has arrived, in the closing months of 2016. To throw some light on the current picture, the Empty Homes Network conducted a survey over the Autumn to find out what staff were employed in addressing the issue of private sector empty homes in each local authority area within England.  Of course this does not provide any insight into the excellent work being done by community organisations and the private sector, but it does allow us to get a feel for the status with official local strategies.  This was a follow-up to a similar survey submitted under Freedom of Information legislation in late 2012[1] allowing us to compare the results of the two surveys to plot trends.   Our request for information We used a slightly different process compared with 2012, by starting with a request that explicitly stated it was NOT made under the FOI legislation. This was simply to avoid some of the bureaucracy that gets engaged when FOI requests come in. As it turned out, the majority of local authorities decided to treat the request as a proper FOI request, some pointing out that if the request was just passed on to the relevant departments to answer we might not get a response!  After allowing a three-week interval, if we had not received even an acknowledgement to our ‘business-as-usual’ request we then submitted a formal FOI request.  This more sensitive approach proved more trouble than it was worth because a fair number of authorities who acknowledged the original request did not in fact respond, showing that the concerns raised by some of the FOI staff were justified. Nevertheless, we did receive 281 responses compared with 272 in 2012. We made some refinements to the survey this time around, for instance seeking to distinguish between the amount of time allocated to empty homes work and the amount of time spent on empty homes work; we also took account of staff in the process of being recruited.[2]  These changes did not prevent us comparing the corresponding figures for 2012 and 2016. Amongst those responding, 38 did not quantify the resource dedicated to bringing empty homes back into use. Various reasons were given, such as:

• as the information was not recorded, it could not legitimately be requested under FOI
• the amount spent was so little that it could not reasonably be reported
• the priority of the work was so low that the authority did nothing about it
• the authority had no empty homes staff

Rather than challenge these (and the first would have been difficult to challenge) or set them at zero, these responses were excluded from the analysis. This left us with 243 results to analyse, and we are very grateful to the people concerned for taking the trouble to provide answers and to estimate the time spent on this important task. Occasionally, estimates consisted of ranges: in those cases we took the mid-point between upper and lower figure.   Results for 2016 We looked at the total of Full Time Equivalent staff and also at the counts of authorities giving certain answers.

• 79 local authorities employ staff with ‘Empty’ in the job title
• this was 32.5% of those responding and equated to 88 FTE posts
• 154 authorities had people whose time was formally allocated to empty homes work
• this was 63.4% of those responding and equated to 163 FTE posts
• in total 216 FTE posts were being applied to tackling private sector empties
• of these 175 or 81% were permanent and 41 or 19% were temporary
• the above totals included 9 FTE permanent posts and 3 FTE temporary posts currently reported as shortly to be recruited

We have not attempted to extrapolate from the above figures to all 326 housing authorities Comparison with 2012 In comparing with 2012, we restricted the analysis to authorities that had provided responses in both years. This was 198 of the total in both years. Regrettably, the net figures had reduced across the board between the two years. This can be thought to reflect austerity or a complete lack of strategic vision or understanding of New Homes Bonus, according to your preferred interpretation.

• the number of staff with ‘Empty’ as part of their job title had reduced by 16 overall, from 97
• the net number of authorities showing a reduction in staff with ‘Empty’ in the job-title was 16 also – or 20% of the total of such authorities.
• however, underlying this were 48 authorities showing reductions and 32 showing an increase
• similarly, looking at the overall level of Full Time Equivalent resource spent on empty homes, 128 had decreased the amount spent, and 46 had increased the amount
• thus, overall, a net 82 authorities had reduced the amount of FTE resource compared with 2012, or 41.4% of the authorities that had reported in both years
• the overall level of FTE resource spent on empty homes had reduced by -27.9%[3]
• there was a bigger decrease in the use of temporary staff (-34.0%) compared with permanent staff (-26.4%) when looking at the overall FTE equivalents.

The full results are available in our Information Library here (Full Members only – you’ll need to be logged in). NOTES