Vacant homes shouldn’t stop us from building more houses
Why can’t the BBC be honest about the housing crisis?
I was disappointed today to read some rather outlandish statements in an article on the BBC news website titled ‘Why are we building homes when so many are standing empty?’ In the article, BBC journalist Brian Wheeler shares the experiences of a range of people involved in local government and charities as they try to tackle the problem of empty homes. If it were just concerned with this, the article would be inoffensive, indeed admirable.
However, for some reason, Wheeler chooses to frame his reporting by making some uninformed claims about the nature of the housing crisis in the UK and what will solve it. He argues as follows:
There are just short of 700,000 empty and unfurnished homes in England, according to the most recent government figures. Of those, 261,471 are classed as “long-term empty,” meaning no-one has lived there for six months or more.
If all empty homes were brought back into use, the housing crisis would be solved at a stroke and, arguably, the government would not have to build 1.5m new homes.
These quotes demonstrate a shockingly poor understanding of the factors behind the housing crisis and seem to trivialise one of the largest brakes on prosperity in this country. And for it to occupy the front page of the BBC News website, the sin is doubly severe.
So much that is wrong in this country can be traced back to the housing crisis. Solving it is one of the most important political tasks of our generation. While housing policy isn’t my typical wheelhouse, it is a subject I feel strongly about. Earlier this year, during the general election campaign, I had the opportunity to ask a question about the housing crisis directly to the panel on BBC’s Politics Live. It’s doubly frustrating, then, that this article was cleared to appear on the BBC News website homepage.
Vacancy Rates & the Scale of the Housing Crisis
Let’s start our rebuttal of Wheeler’s statement with the numbers he uses. He argues that if all 700,000 vacant homes in the UK were immediately given new occupiers, “the housing crisis would be solved at a stroke”. Here, the numbers just don’t add up. The UK currently has a housing backlog of some 4.3 million homes. More than 6 times as many houses are needed than can be provided by vacancies alone.
It should be clear, also, that the new government’s target of 1.5m new homes throughout the next parliament is still well short of what’s needed to solve this crisis. Assuming a full 5-year parliament, that would mean 300,000 new homes per year and, therefore, 15 years (three parliaments!) of continuous housebuilding to fill the black hole we have today.
But while the scale of the crisis certainly extends beyond vacancy rates, is it true that Britain is an outlier when it comes to empty homes? The data doesn’t support that kind of assessment. According to the OECD Affordable Housing Database, England has one of the lowest vacant rates in Europe (graph below).
A more practical problem arises with Wheeler’s suggestion when we consider exactly where this vacant stock sits. Using the same data as Wheeler, we can determine the percentage of vacant dwellings in highly desirable cities like London. Looking only at long-term vacant dwellings for 2023, London has 36,210 representing 0.96% of its total housing stock. Well below even the low average for England. What’s more, if these long-term vacant homes were immediately reoccupied, this would still represent less than half of the (watered down!) government target of 80,000 new homes in the capital every year.
The ONS has put together a fantastic tool (above) that visualises the distribution of vacant homes in England. It should be clear, now, to see that the demand for new housing and areas of vacant housing simply do not line up. This isn’t a surprise, however, to anyone who understands the dynamics of supply and demand.
This brings us back to the crux of the issue with the suggestion that vacant homes are some magic bullet that would solve the housing crisis. Those most desirable places to live (big cities with dynamic labour markets and high wages) have incredibly low vacancy rates. The housing crisis in London, where rents grew by 16.1% in 2022 and a further 5.3% in 2023, and where it would take an average couple fifteen years to save up for a deposit on a property, would be scarcely affected by such a policy.
Hence why I say: “build, build, build.”
