‘They told me there were no council houses’: Homeless families – but 33,000 properties are empty | UK news

Tens of thousands of council homes are currently empty despite the country facing a national housing crisis.

There are 33,993 vacant council properties in England, the highest number since 2009. And Sky News can reveal that more than 6,000 public houses have been empty for over a year.

These include several residences that have been closed on an estate in Lambeth, south London, for more than two decades and 144 flats in a boarded-up tower block in neighboring Southwark which has been empty since 2015. It was due to be redeveloped, but construction costs have increased so much that it is to be demolished.

Sky News worked with housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa to reveal the council’s number of vacant properties using Freedom of Information requests.

Mr Tweneboa told Sky News: “You have people sleeping on the streets. You have people sleeping in garages and storage containers. Yet we have thousands of empty homes, council houses up and down the country, that are not being used.

“It makes no sense. It is a complete dereliction of duty and failure to care for those who need it most.”

Instead of repairing the homes they own, councils pay millions each year to private landlords to house families in temporary emergency accommodation, including hostels.

The latest figures show that 145,800 children in England are homeless and living in temporary accommodation – a record high and 15% more than a year ago.

Rose, 21 years old, she lives with her little girls in one room in a B&B in Streatham, Lambeth.

For Rose – who works part-time and is studying to be an air traffic controller – private rent in south London is out of the question.

She says she constantly worries about the impact of being homeless on her daughters, aged five and two.

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“My first born still wears diapers because in the middle of the night he can’t just get up and go to a shared toilet with all these people he doesn’t know,” she says. “My baby – it took him a while to walk because he didn’t have enough room and couldn’t use the walker.”

She regularly calls Croydon Council to find out if she is any closer to getting a permanent home, but a recent call with a council worker has her worried.

“He told me you’d have to move out of London and find a house,” says Rose. “She told me there are no council homes, there are no social homes, those were her words – we don’t have social homes.”

However, within a short drive from where Rose lives, I showed her dozens of empty houses.

The houses are on an estate in Lambeth which was earmarked for redevelopment a few years ago. Despite the fact that many of the properties have been emptied, there is no sign of construction work.

Rose says the revelation that there are empty social homes in London makes her feel “cut off, lied to and cheated”.

The Local Government Association (LGA) blames a lack of council funding for the number of vacant properties.

Victor Chamberlain, an LGA housing spokesman, told Sky News that in many cases “the council doesn’t have the money to be able to refurbish them and bring them back into use as council houses”.

He said the money was being paid to private landlords for temporary accommodation because councils “have a duty as a local authority to make sure no one is sleeping rough or they don’t have a safe place to sleep every night”.

Mr Chamberlain continued: “That means we have to divert funds to those causes and not to building new council homes, which are absolutely essential to solving the problem.

“It’s completely bad management. You know, there is a completely false economy.

“If we fail to spend the money on the real solution, but use a plaster stuck on temporary accommodation, then the system is broken.”

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Lambeth Council told Sky News: “Lambeth is committed to bringing empty homes back into use as quickly as possible.”

It added: “The majority of our empty properties have been vacant for less than six months.”

I asked Croydon Council why Rose was told there was no social housing available.

A few days later, he replied: “We have been working with our resident to find more suitable accommodation to meet their needs and have identified a permanent home which we will be offering them soon.

“Croydon has been affected by an increase in homelessness and a housing shortage across London.

“Unfortunately, this means there aren’t always permanent homes available for families as quickly as we would like.”

Additional reporting by Nick Stylianou, Community Producer.