In an exclusive front page story, Inside Housing magazine reports that the government has admitted that the allocation of HMR Transition funding for the purposes of widespread demolitions was unlwaful and has therefore decided not to contest the judicial review of its actions.
The Inside Housing story claims that
"Lawyers acting for the government have written to campaign group SAVE's solicitors setting out the terms under which it is willing to concede defeat..."
We reported on SAVE's successful application for judicial review in a September news story. The latest development consolidates a major success for SAVE and the charity Empty...
A letter written to local authorities at the end of July apparently indicates the government's intention to offer councils complete...
Justice Kenneth Parker has dismissed an appeal against a CPO where the appellant tried to claim that, because the dwelling...
The long awaited changes to the Empty Dwelling Management Order regime are now moving forward as the relevant Statutory Instrument...
We have submitted our consultation response regarding how Empty Homes Premium should be taken account of in the Council Tax Base figures.
Although our worst fears about EHP affecting New Homes Bonus seem not to have been justified (according to advice received from finance experts at LGA) we have nevertheless questioned the allocation of the revenue received, arguing that it should be distributed by giving priority to housing authorities and police and fire authorities. The technicalities of how this might best be done with regard to CTB calculations is, regrettably, not clear to us however.
Our final consultation response can...
We've put our draft consultation response on the exceptions to the Empty Homes Premium on the website here for download....
The first draft of our consultation response on the Empty Homes Premium has now been published (follow this link for...
Latest
September 28, 2012
CLG has for the first time published figures showing the contribution made by reductions in the number of empty homes...
Latest
September 24, 2012
St Helens Council in conjunction with Merseyside police are among the first to implement this new Legislation.
Just two days...
Latest
September 23, 2012
Over the last couple of years the government has been re-configuring its figures on empty homes as part of a...
Latest
September 20, 2012
The High Court has ordered a judicial review of the government's handling of the £35million transition fund that was designed to ease some of the issues associated with the abrupt ending of the Housing Market Renewal programme.
The issue here is that most of the money was used to fund continuing demolition of properties arousing considerable anger amongst organisations such as SAVE (Save Britain's Heritage) and Empty Homes who had been expecting that the transition fund would be used to rescue some of the homes from demolition (for example, through homesteading or other schemes). For background and some strongly expressed...
Latest
September 16, 2012
This is very tardy news-reporting given that this collection of essays was published back in Feburary 2012. It appears not...
Latest
September 14, 2012
The government is currently consulting on how the council tax collected in the form of Empty Homes Premium should afffect...
Don Foster (pictured right*), Liberal Democract MP for Bath, has replaced Andrew Stunell at the Department for Communities and Local...
