Housing Numbers Matter
December 2023
Housing isn't all about numbers but we hear a lot about shortages of supply and unbuilt planning permissions.
In empty homes work, numbers do matter with a record high of 104,000 homeless families in unsuitable and overcrowded Temporary Accommodation and a million homes out of use. We recently wrote to the Statistics Regulator about how the Government was displaying these statistics in a misleading manner and they agreed with us...
As a result the Government Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities has agreed to significantly improve its display of statistics on empty homes.
This includes better labeling of the only diagram in the Statistical Release, which appeared to show empty and second homes numbers as just a tiny fraction of their true total of around 1 million.
Improvements also include making data on 200,000 'hidden' Council Tax Exempt empty homes more easily available and more clearly representing data that includes England's 257,000 empty so-called 'second homes' out of residential use.
These so-called second homes are sometimes known as 'furnished empties' and seem to include a variety of types of homes and to be somewhat inconsistently recorded.
Oddly there are large numbers reported by cities such as Bradford (2,600) and Leicester (where there are a whopping 4,412 after numbers mysteriously doubled last year); as well as those more commonly associated with leisure investments in areas such as Cornwall (13,300) and North Norfolk (5,500) or with international investment in London (where there are 46,000 recorded).
And while cities like Manchester (6,360), Leeds (2,300) and Newcastle (2,750) also have significant numbers, Liverpool reports less than 200.
What we do know is that just like the current official total of 676,000 empty homes. The 257,000 'furnished empties' have nobody living in them either.
You can read the Statistics Regulator's decision in full here