Middlesbrough Council - News Forum - Setting a light to the News

Architect and campaigner George Clarke invites you to join the campaign to fill Britain's empty homes.
Watch Campaign Video

MIDDLESBROUGH Council is supporting National Empty Homes Week (December 5 - 9) and reminding owners of empty homes that they can obtain free advice to help them return their properties to use.
Empty homes can be expensive for owners with costs including maintenance, security and insurance.
The Empty Homes Agency estimates that empty homes can cost owners as much as £135 a week without taking in to account issues such as vandalism and property depreciation. Problematic empty properties can be eyesores and have an adverse impact on neighbours.
Councillor Julia Rostron, Middlesbrough Council’s Executive Member for Community Protection, said: “Empty homes can attract fly-tipping and vandalism and this impacts on neighbours.
“Bringing an empty home back in to use has benefits for communities by providing homes to those in housing need, improving the physical appearance of the area and increasing spending with local businesses.
“Owners can obtain free advice about issues such as selling or letting their property, finding tenants and undertaking repairs.
“Our aim is to help owners to return their properties to use through a range of advice and support - but we will take enforcement action when needed.”
http://www.middlesbrough.towntalk.co.uk ... omes-week/

But even if all of the long-term empties were brought back into use it would still only scratch the surface of housing need. There are around 800,000 empty properties in England but only 280,000 of them are long term empties. The rest are empty for valid reasons - awaiting new tenants or owners to move in, or for probate to be sorted out. Any properly functioning housing market will always have a proportion of empty properties, otherwise it will stagnate.

Yet we have 2 million households on waiting lists and the average age of a first time buyer is 37.

What’s more, as Shelter has pointed out, many long-term empty properties are in places where people do not want to live. I have several times suggested to young people that they should consider moving to Middlesbrough, as you can buy a Victorian terrace there for £10,000. Their response is always the same; “Who the hell wants to live in Middlesbrough?”

Housing crisis in the north of England deepens
16 December 2011 10:46AM

I have just read your article 'Housing crisis in the north of England deepens' and am amazed by some of the comments made by people who have very little if any, knowledge about the so called 'current housing crisis', which incidentally, has been going on un-noticed by some for the past 20 years or so. This very sad situation, has been caused mostly by ill-informed, power struck politicians who have been using people as pawns in their game of 'housing regeneration' for the people, most of whom who were quite happy in their cosy little 2/3 bedroomed homes, most of which were in very good condition and paid for!

Whilst working for Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire in 1999 - 2002, I won The Empty Homes Agency's National Awards for my innovative ideas... The Best Strategy for Tackling Low Demand in Housing which was all about housing problems in the North of England. My pioneering strategies soon had people moving from the overcrowded London Boroughs and the south-east into beautiful homes in 'Last of the Summer Wine’ country in West Yorkshire!'

The BBC made two documentaries of this pioneering work and I attended many national and regional housing & regeneration conferences to publicise the methods and results to other interested housing professionals.

I then worked as Low Demand Project Manager for the Empty Homes Agency – http://www.emptyhomes.com from 2002 – 2005 and became involved with many community groups in many areas of the UK, i.e. Burnley, Bury, Gateshead, Goole, Hull, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Salford, Stoke-on-Trent and also the Granby Triangle and the Welsh Streets in Liverpool, where homes were under the threat of demolition as a direct result of the previous government’s Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder Initiative.

In 2005, ITV filmed the renovation of a derelict house in the Welsh Streets of Liverpool for around £25,000 and to a very high standard. When the programme was televised there was some criticism that the house had been a ‘bodged-up’ job, but it proved to more open -minded people, that these houses could indeed be brought back to life and be improved to such a good standard that there would be a big demand for them from local people!

It was very encouraging to read the headlines in the Liverpool Echo (and other media outlets) in May 2010, where the ‘new’ Leader of the Council, Joe Anderson said, “I’ll End City Housing Scandal”. He went on to say that he was ordering an urgent review of the Council’s flagship Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI) which is costing tens of millions of pounds! Proposed home demolitions may be scrapped!

At present there are over 11,000 long-term empty homes in Liverpool, awaiting some sort of action, including demolition and there are currently over 25,000 people on the housing waiting lists – those figures show me that something is very wrong with Liverpool’s housing strategy! Yet they continue to mess these people about and for what?

I have now devised a self financing housing scheme, which will not only kick start the local economy of Liverpool and other large cities in England, but will also get people off the huge housing waiting lists and on to the first rung of the property ladder! All I need is about an hour of the City Leader's time, to enable me to run my presentation by them, which would highlight how it can be done and how easy it will be to achieve! I have written to Liverpool City Council with this offer, for which I will not charge any fees and am awaiting a response.

I have written to David Cameron, Eric Pickles, Grant Shapps and Andrew Stunnel, outlining my proposed scheme and to date I've not had a single reply and yet our country is supposed to be in dire straits financially!

The recent campaign on Channel 4 - The Great British Property Scandal has done much to highlight the facts about the 1 million or so empty properties in England just standing there waiting to be refurbished and occupied.

So come on all you caring Government Ministers, Joe Anderson, Ray Mallon at Middlesbrough and all the other LA's and ex- Pathdfinders in the UK, less of the political rhetoric and more action please! Your forgotten people of Liverpool and those who live in other cities living in those dreadful forgotten communities need you do something urgent with their homes before it is to late!

My final question to all the those politicians out there who are still adamant on demolition rather than refurbishment - why do you still want to demolish perfectly good homes, when there are over 5 million people on the Housing Waiting List on the UK? Do you think it makes sense, when there are other perfectly viable alternatives which for what ever reason, you and your political colleagues are choosing to ignore?

Have you ever seriously considered the plight of the homeless, the overcrowded and all those people out there who will not have a roof over their heads this Christmas?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/us ... ts/DJJohne

The fight against fraud

DJ Johne's comment | 13/01/2012 10:11 am
It's criminal and fraud and it needs dealing with, as it's estimated to be costing the TAXPAYER £900 Million per year or is that not worth bothering about!!!
More stringent checks need to be done at the start of the tenancy and at regular intervals throughout the tenancy!
Good estate management is what's needed here.
No wonder this country is in a BIG mess!!!
Read more
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/dj-johne ... licprofile

The fight against fraud

13/01/2012 | By Stuart Macdonald
The minister’s call this week echoes that made by his predecessor John Healey in July 2009 which, despite the fanfare, resulted in only an additional 28 homes being recovered compared with the previous year.
Mr Shapps will expect to do better - especially as his department spent £19 million on this issue in December 2010. The taxpayer is unlikely to want to continue to throw good money after bad, however, so will the proposals in the consultation work without further financial support?
The plan to make sub-letting a criminal offence has been welcomed by landlords, as has the move to oblige utility companies to comply with local authority (but not housing association) requests for billing information on customers.
The real problem with this, though, is the fact that there is little incentive for social landlords to spend precious resources on tackling tenancy fraud. There is the obvious moral argument outlined by Mr Shapps. The minister also hopes that the plan to give landlords back any ill-gotten gains seized from illegal sub-letters will help here. But the likelihood is that this will not often amount to much.
That said, social landlords are now doing more to crack down on the problem. The Chartered Institute of Housing has used government funding to set up a team to help housing providers improve existing procedures, such as tenancy checks, to weed out fraudsters. Success here can help cut the amount spent on expensive temporary accommodation and can make a dent in waiting lists.
Greater impact is likely to be made in the fight against fraud as a result of two other measures we report on this week: allocations and rents.
Time-limited tenancies will mean sub-letting cannot go on for long and increasing rents will, in many areas, narrow the gap between market and social rents. The move to ‘affordable’ rents of up to 80 per cent of the market rate will accelerate this and hence make the risk of unlawfully sub-letting less worthwhile.
Read more
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/blo ... 19.article

JamesBond wrote: