‘They told me there were no council houses’: Homeless families – but 33,000 properties are empty | News from the United Kingdom

Tens of thousands of council houses 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 more than 6,000 publicly owned homes have been empty for more than 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 block of flats in neighboring Southwark, which has been empty since 2015. , that it is ready for demolition.

Sky News worked with housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa to reveal the number of vacant properties in the council using freedom of information requests.

Mr Tweneboa told Sky News: “You’ve got people sleeping on the streets. You’ve got people sleeping in garages and storage containers. Yet we’ve got thousands of empty houses, council houses across the country that aren’t being used, it doesn’t make any sense.”

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

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

Rose, 21, she lives with her young daughters in one room at a bed and breakfast in Streatham, Lambeth.

For Rose – who works part-time while also studying to become an air traffic controller – private renting in south London is out of the question.

She says she constantly worries about the impact homelessness will have on her daughters, aged five and two.

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

She regularly calls Croydon Council to see if she is close to being offered a permanent home, but a recent call to a council worker left her worried.

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

And yet, not far from where Rose lives, we showed her dozens of empty houses.

The houses are on the Lambeth estate, which was earmarked for redevelopment a few years ago. Despite many properties being vacant, there are no signs of construction work.

Rose says she feels “heartbroken, lied to and cheated” after discovering there are empty social housing in London.

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

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

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

Mr Chamberlain continued: “This means we need to redirect funding to these purposes and not to building new council houses, which are absolutely essential to solving the problem.

“It’s total mismanagement. You know, there’s a total false economy out there.”

“If we’re not able to spend money on real solutions, but we’re using a patchwork of temporary accommodation, then the system is broken.”

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

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

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

A few days later it responded: “We have been working with our residents to find more suitable accommodation to meet their needs and have found a permanent home to offer them soon.

“Croydon has been affected by the rise in homelessness and housing shortages across London.

“Unfortunately, this means that permanent homes are not always available for families as quickly as we would like.”

More news from Nick Stylianou, Community Producer.