Suzanne Muna of Social Housing Action Campaign

HUNDREDS of thousands of empty homes could be brought back into use under government plans to give councils greater powers to tackle long-term empty properties.

In his closing speech at the Labour conference in Liverpool last week, Andy Burnham said councils would be given powers to “take control” of empty homes and bring them back into the housing stock.

“Go to almost any town across Britain and you will see plenty of empty homes,” he said.

The new prime minister and housing secretary Angela Rayner pledged action against landlords who rent the worst quality homes who will be given warnings to improve them or risk the council seizing them.

But housing cam­paigners said questions remain over how exactly councils will implement the new powers and how it will be funded.

Suzanne Muna, the co-founder of Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC), told the Extra: “All they have put out are media- grabbing headlines rather than any detail on how it will be done.

“It would be impossible to know if Angela Rayner’s pledges are possible without really knowing how they are going to do it. What we should really be doing is ending the Right to Buy, and ending the transfer of council housing to private landlords.

“We could be investing in council housing services, and tenancy support services.

“If people become more stable, their tenancy becomes more stable. We need to reverse all those cuts over the past two decades. I absolutely don’t have any faith in this government. Angela Rayner has already said that social landlords can put their rents up by inflation plus 1 per cent for the next decade. It’s going to bring social rent levels much closer to private rent levels over that period of time.”

Ms Muna who is a lecturer in trade union studies at City of Bristol College said helpful measures could include bringing back the National Empty Homes Programme, which attempted to tackle long-term vacant homes, until it was scrapped in 2015.

The programme ran from 2012 with £156million in funding to local authorities and housing associations to bring long-term vacant properties back into use, driving the numbers of vacant properties to a low in 2016.

But, since it ended, that figure has climbed again.

There are now more than one million empty, vacant, and second homes across England, according to data from Action on Empty Homes.

“I think we need to address the obscenity of properties standing empty, not just the ex-council stock,” Ms Muna added.

“We have people buying luxury apartments purely as investment opportunities and they are just standing empty and were never intended to be filled.

“Why are we allowing that when there is a housing crisis?”

Housing secretary Angela Rayner said there are currently more than 300,000 long-term empty homes and 180,000 children living in temporary accom­modation. She told the Labour Party conference: “For those homes that sit idle and unused, we will make it easier for councils to bring these homes back into use for desperate families in need, sweeping away Tory barriers that hampered our local leaders from taking action.”

Chris Bailey, director of policy and campaigns at Action on Empty Homes said: “The national housing programme directly brought into use in three years over 10,000 homes. We would like to see a more ambitious programme.We do support Rayner’s announcement. What you need is a realistic threat that if you are completely unresponsive to the council’s request as a landlord and you are going to leave a property to fall into rack and ruin and drag the neighbour­hood down, we can take action, and action that doesn’t require transfer of owner­ship.”