I recently contacted the City Council's Director of Housing about the Scottish Empty Homes Partnership - an excellent initiative that includes COSLA on behalf of Scottish local government, Shelter Scotland and Scottish Government and aims to get many of Scotland's empty homes back into use and thereby further help tackle homelessness.
I was keen to ensure that Dundee City Council signed up for the Empty Homes Initiative and very encouraged by a detailed and positive response from the Director, the main points from which I detail below :
"The Housing Department contacted Kristen Miller from the Scottish Empty Homes Partnership back in September to discuss the initiative.
Since then, the Department has had the opportunity to meet with Kristen to learn more about the initiative and discuss it further. The meeting was helpful in finding out how we might best target our efforts within Dundee.
Kristen's role is to provide information and support to local authorities and their partners to examine initiatives to make better use of empty properties where possible. Many of the examples of good practice highlighted by Kristen relate to action underway in England and Wales where there are different legislative mechanisms and funding streams available to bring empty homes back into use.
Key to the development of a strategy is identifying empty properties and finding out why they are empty. Kristen has been developing a quick reference guide to developing questionnaires to assess why properties are left empty, what owners intentions are towards their property and what are the barriers to bringing such properties back into use.
The Council has now also decided to reduce council tax discounts for second homes from 50% to 10%, additional funding can be used towards funding social rented housing. This reduction in relief may be an incentive to owners not to leave properties vacant. Work undertaken for recommending this reduction in discount indicated that there are around 180 second homes within the City.
You may have noticed in Housing News that according to the Bank of Scotland the number of vacant properties in Scotland has risen to its highest level in six years. There were 106,239 vacant homes in Scotland in September 2009, a rise of 2.7 per cent from 103,433 in September 2008. The number of vacant homes is at its highest since 2003 (106,312), accounting for 4.3 per cent of all homes in Scotland. harnessing this adds weight to the drive to bring empty homes back into use.
Many of the local authorities with high levels of vacant properties are rural authorities for instance Western Isles has the largest proportion of vacant homes in Scotland (13.3 per cent); over three times the average for Scotland (4.3 per cent). Argyll and Bute (11.4 per cent) have the second highest level of empty homes, followed by Orkney Islands (8.9 per cent). Based on the figure of 180 second homes in Dundee would equate to 0.25% of the total housing stock.
Dundee City Council has signed up to the Empty Homes Initiative. From the discussions and investigation to date the next steps we are progressing within the Housing Department are the development of a questionnaire to owners of second homes to assess reasons why properties are lying vacant as well as information provision highlighting to owners the possibilities for bringing their properties into use. This would include information for example on how to register as a private landlord and the Scheme of Assistance for repairs to private sector dwellings."