Action on Empty Homes

The housing crisis across England, and indeed much of the developed world, is often framed as a simple failure of supply. The narrative suggests that we simply haven't built enough homes to meet demand. While new construction is undoubtedly part of the solution, this narrative overlooks a stark and morally jarring paradox: over a million homes in England currently stand empty or are otherwise under-utilised, existing as wasted assets while hundreds of thousands of families are trapped in temporary accommodation or experiencing homelessness. This is the crisis that Action on Empty Homes (AoEH), a national campaigning charity, has relentlessly worked to address for over three decades, arguing that solving the housing emergency requires not just building anew, but strategically reclaiming and repurposing the homes that already exist.

AoEH’s mission is fundamentally simple but profoundly challenging: to campaign, research, and support communities in their efforts to bring vacant and under-utilised homes back into residential use. Their work reveals a complex tapestry of systemic failures, where housing is treated as a speculative financial commodity rather than a fundamental human right. By spotlighting the data—which, as of 2024, shows over 265,000 homes are officially long-term empty (vacant and unfurnished for six months or more), with the total number of empty and second homes nearing one million—AoEH transforms the abstract "housing crisis" into a concrete failure of policy and resource management.

The social and economic fallout from this wastage is immense. Long-term empty properties degrade neighbourhoods, attract vandalism, depress property values for legitimate homeowners, and, most crucially, deny shelter to those in desperate need. This is why a new national Empty Homes Programme, with funding and powers devolved to local councils, remains a core demand. However, the solution must go beyond quick fixes for derelict properties; it demands a radical re-evaluation of how housing functions in the national economy, particularly in areas facing extreme market distortion.

The Rural and Coastal Crisis: When Housing Becomes a Hotel

While the issue of empty properties affects every corner of the country, the nature of the crisis intensifies in rural and coastal communities. In these picturesque, often highly desirable locations, the housing market distortion is driven not just by general neglect, but by the relentless pressures of investment and short-term tourism. For residents who are homeless or struggling to afford housing, this dynamic is particularly cruel. It is in this context that AoEH recently partnered with academic experts to expose the systemic root causes of the rural housing emergency.

This crisis was the focus of their major report with Qasimah Mease of Sheffield University and the Social Statistics and Evaluation Data unit. The report provides granular, evidence-based recommendations for policy changes to boost rural and coastal housing access. These areas face a perfect storm: high volumes of second homes and short-term holiday lets (such as Airbnb), low average local wages, and a scarcity of development sites. This combination effectively hollows out communities, drives up rental and purchase costs beyond the reach of local families, forces young people and essential workers out, and threatens the viability of local services, from schools to shops.

The report’s policy agenda is a call for a robust reassertion of housing as a place for living over a means for speculation. It argues for an integrated policy framework that tackles the multiple ways in which homes are taken out of permanent residential use. The proposals centre on empowering local authorities with financial and statutory tools to manage their housing stock effectively, rather than relying on the current, often inadequate, suite of powers.

Systemic Policy Recommendations for Housing Justice

The joint report and AoEH's ongoing campaigns recommend a comprehensive suite of policy actions designed to mitigate market failures and restore housing access to local communities.

Reining in '2nd Homes' and Long-Term Empties

The campaign advocates for stronger financial disincentives to prevent housing wealth from remaining unproductive. While the government has empowered councils to strengthen Council Tax premiums, AoEH pushes for these powers to be used more effectively and aggressively:

1. Strengthened Council Tax Premiums: Local authorities now have the power to charge a 100% premium on Council Tax for homes left empty for just one year (down from two years). Furthermore, from 2025, councils can apply a 100% premium on second homes. AoEH insists that these powers must be fully implemented, with revenues ring-fenced to directly fund local affordable housing initiatives. Early evidence, such as from councils in North Wales, shows that these premiums are an effective "stick," already contributing to a reduction in the number of long-term empty properties, although this must be balanced against local fears of impact on the tourism economy.
2. Local Tax Retention: A key financial proposal is to allow local authorities to retain a greater share of the tax revenue generated from these premiums. This creates a powerful financial incentive for councils to actively pursue empty homes work, transforming the problem into a self-funding solution for local affordable housing provision, a clear application of Note G.

Regulating Short-Term Holiday Letting (Airbnb Licensing)

The proliferation of short-term lets, often managed through platforms like Airbnb, has drastically reduced the available rental stock in desirable areas. This process, known as "de-listing," converts homes that could house families into commercial hotel-style operations. The report recommends mandatory licensing and planning controls for all short-term lets. This would allow councils to:

• Track and cap the number of non-residential properties in a given area.
• Enforce a planning category change, requiring owners to seek formal planning permission to convert a home into a holiday let, thereby making it easier to return properties to the permanent residential market.
• The goal is to ensure that a balance is struck, preventing the "hollowing out" of communities while still allowing for legitimate tourism.

Planning and Responsible Lending Reform

AoEH’s broader vision requires reform in two other critical, interconnected areas:

1. Planning Reform: The planning system must be reformed to give local authorities explicit power to manage the tenure and type of housing in their area. This includes enabling councils to mandate a higher proportion of genuinely social housing in new developments, and to introduce mechanisms that ensure homes built for local need remain so, resisting market pressures that push prices out of reach.
2. Responsible Lending: The role of the financial sector in fueling the empty homes crisis is often overlooked. The report touches on the need for responsible lending practices that discourage purely speculative property investment—the practice of buying a property solely to profit from its capital value increase, often leaving it vacant in the interim. This calls for scrutiny of lending that facilitates the warehousing of housing assets, a practice that directly contributes to the shortage for people who are homeless or precariously housed.

The overall vision encapsulated in these proposals is one of empowering local communities and authorities to manage their housing assets for social benefit, rather than leaving them subject to the volatile and often damaging forces of the global financial market.

The Anti-Speculative Model: Learning from Zurich’s Co-operatives

To truly envision a housing market that prioritises people over profit, one must look beyond temporary fixes and towards fundamental structural alternatives. The work of AoEH, while rooted in the immediate crisis of empty homes, opens the door to discussions about more resilient and equitable housing models—chief among these is the internationally successful model of housing co-operatives, exemplified by the city of Zurich, Switzerland.

Zurich presents a powerful counter-narrative to the financialisation of housing. In a system where land and property are often treated as the ultimate investment vehicle, the Zurich model demonstrates how intentional policy can withdraw housing from the speculative market permanently. This is achieved through the principle of Gemeinnützigkeit (public benefit or non-profit status), which governs the city’s housing co-operatives.

Peter Apps, a contributing editor at Inside Housing, powerfully described the consequence of this model, noting that:

"In Zurich, Switzerland, one in every five citizens live in a housing co-operative, meaning they own the company that owns their home. The result is a different kind of housing market: Peter Apps said that the cooperative structure means there is ‘no landlord, no speculative property developer, no soaring housing prices, no profit, no need for evictions and a structure that supports genuinely affordable housing and communal living.’"

This quote encapsulates the revolutionary potential of the cooperative model. In essence, residents do not own their specific apartment as a private, tradeable asset; they own a share in the non-profit cooperative company that owns the entire development.

How the Zurich Model Achieves Permanent Affordability

The key mechanisms that make Zurich’s cooperative housing successful and permanently affordable are:

1. Non-Speculative Ownership: The homes are not traded on the open market. When a co-op resident leaves, their share is usually bought back by the co-operative, often at the nominal original price, plus an adjustment for inflation, not based on current market rates. This mechanism permanently delinks the cost of living from the cost of property speculation, ensuring that housing remains affordable for the next generation of residents. Some co-ops founded in the 1920s still offer rents at one-third of the current market rate.
2. Cost-Induced Rents: Rents are calculated based purely on the running costs of the building, maintenance, and the servicing of debt (often publicly or semi-publicly guaranteed at favourable rates), not on generating profit or competing with market rents.
3. Community and Agency: The residents themselves are the owners and decision-makers. They have a vested interest in their community, leading to developments that are planned for long-term communal well-being, often including shared facilities, nurseries, shops, and car-free policies. This fosters the "guerilla politics of the slow cook", as one commentator noted, ensuring the projects are robust, sustainable, and tailored to resident needs.

By embracing and supporting housing co-operatives as a statutory, state-backed third pillar of the housing market (alongside private and social sectors), Zurich has created a stable, equitable, and ultimately resilient system.

Conclusion: A Path to Community-Led Housing

The work of Action on Empty Homes serves as both a critical data source and a powerful catalyst for change. By consistently highlighting the absurdity of a million wasted homes alongside a severe housing crisis, the organisation forces policymakers to address the most immediate and tangible failures of the current system.

The Sheffield University report, focused on rural and coastal communities, rightly targets the key drivers of market distortion—second homes and short-term lets—and proposes practical, statutory tools for local authorities. These policy recommendations—on 2nd homes, Airbnb licensing, local tax retention, and responsible lending—represent necessary, immediate steps to stem the bleeding of residential stock.

However, the ultimate solution lies in the integrated vision: not just bringing empty homes back into use, but permanently withdrawing them and new developments from the grip of speculative finance. The blueprint from Zurich’s housing co-operatives offers a clear, proven pathway to a truly non-market housing sector that prioritises social utility over private gain. Implementing a national empty homes programme, while essential for immediate relief for people who are homeless, must be paired with a long-term commitment to championing and funding community-led housing models that guarantee affordability for generations. The challenge is immense, but the opportunity—to turn wasted assets into homes and speculation into secure community wealth—is too vital to ignore.

For more insight into how co-operative living can redefine urban life, you can watch

Zürich: co-operative living

This video provides a look at a unique mixed-use development that is part of the non-profit co-operative housing tradition in Zurich.