Haringey Council to Seize Empty Homes for Homeless Residents

Haringey Council says it is initiating a programme to clamp down on empty homes. A report to Cabinet this week (attached below) said it is a scandal that homes stand empty during a housing crisis.

There are 1,188 empty homes in the borough and one in every 100 properties have been empty for at least the last six months.

The empty homes could house more than a third of the Haringey households currently homeless and living in temporary accommodation.

The newest figures published by housing charity Shelter, from the first quarter of 2019, record Haringey as having 2,933 households in temporary accommodation. Of those, 2,588 were households with dependent children.

The report this week said that the number of empty properties was fast rising. Between October 2018 and October 2019, empty homes rose by more than 35 per cent from 732 to 996. In the last eight months, the figure has risen by another 20pc, to 1,188.

In the report, the Council said: “Where owners of empty homes cannot be traced, or they are unwilling to work with us in a meaningful way towards bringing their property back into use, we will not hesitate to use the range of enforcement powers available to us. These include Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs), enforced sale and CPO.”

EDMOs permit a local authority to take possession – but not ownership – of a property for up to seven years and install tenants in it.

The council has published plans to top up its existing £1million CPO fund with an extra £5million in next year’s budget, so it can forcibly buy up unused properties.

This move comes hot on the heels of another report by pressure group Action on Empty Homes which challenged Haringey's claim to be the only Borough in England to have no second homes. Learn more on the group's website, here.

See Haringey's Empty Homes web page here.