1,644 Cheltenham Properties lie empty - An injustice for the 2,713 people on the Cheltenham Council House Waiting List?

Easy problems should have easy solutions  - shouldn’t they?

Problems like Cheltenham’s housing crisis, where we have a rudimentary numerical problem of too few homes for too many people ... the answer is clearly to build more property in Cheltenham - but that, unfortunately for those desperately seeking to purchase or let a property, takes a lot of time and huge amounts of money. So what of other solutions?

The most recent set of figures from 2015 state there are 1,644 empty homes in the Cheltenham Borough Council area. So it begs the question ... why not put them back onto the system and help ease the Cheltenham housing crisis? Whilst they stand empty 2,713 Cheltenham households (not people – households) are on the Council House Waiting List for council houses. Surely, we can undoubtedly all agree that property left empty for years and years isn’t morally right with the burgeoning Council House Waiting List, not to also mention the issue of homelessness.

But a different story emerges when you look deeper into the numbers. Of those 1,644 homes lying empty, only 388 properties were empty for more than six months. The local authority has to report a property being empty, even if its for a week. So many of the Cheltenham properties are either awaiting new homeowners or, in the case of rental properties, new tenants. Also most certainly, some properties are being refurbished and renovated, while others properties have homeowners who are anxious to sell but cannot find a buyer.

And this is where its gets even more interesting. Of the 388 long-term vacant properties (those empty more than six months), 37 belong to the council. However, before we all go Council-bashing, anecdotal evidence suggests these empty council houses are habitually in need of so much restoration that it’s not worth the Council’s while to do and are in the roughest parts of the council estates, they are properties that even the Council find difficult to fill.

The fact is that the number of genuinely long term empty properties is only a tiny drop in the ocean of the 50,929 properties in the area covered by Cheltenham Borough Council and, even if every one of those empty homes were filled with tenants tomorrow, it would only meet a small fraction of Cheltenham housing needs.

So what does this mean for all the homeowners and landlords of Cheltenham? Well it means with demand being so high, especially for rental properties, the certainty of the rental market growing is an inevitability because young people cannot buy and councils don’t have the money to build new council houses.