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RESOLVED: That Cabinet:
 

(1)  
Adopted the Empty Homes Strategy 2024-29.
 

(2)  
Noted that although there is no legal requirement for the Council
to have an Empty Homes Strategy, there have been several
significant Government-focussed documents and papers highlighting
their importance, including a House of Commons Briefing Paper
stating that each local authority should have such a strategy to
help reduce the number of long-tern empty homes in their
districts.
 

REASONS FOR DECISIONS:

(1)  
The recommendation and considerations are being made to allow the
Council to formerly adopt the 5-year Empty Homes Strategy 2024-29
to allow the Environmental Health service to work directly or with
others to identify and deliver the most appropriate intervention
programme to allow the Council to aim to bring as many long-term
empty homes back into occupation as practicable.
 

(2)  
The strategy allows the Council to state its intention to consider
every aspect linked to the housing sector to bring into use as many
opportunities as it can to meet the district’s housing needs,
without having to rely solely on new build. Whilst the number of
long-term empty homes is small, and the number likely to be brought
back into occupation will be smaller still, this strategy does
address this sector which would otherwise be omitted from the
overall resource potentially available to form our housing
stock.
 

(3)  
By adopting the strategy and allowing for the development of a
culture of greater awareness of vacant homes, allows for homes
which become vacant to be highlighted sooner, and so they can be
monitored and their owners challenged at
an earlier point, thus also contributing to hopefully having more
homes available for the residents of the district.