Oxford has 920 long-term empty properties

Powers to get these properties back into use have failed to ease Oxford’s chronic housing shortage, an Oxford Mail investigation has shown.

In 2006, the Government introduced Empty Dwelling Management Orders (EDMOs) to give councils in England the power to take control of private houses that had been vacant for longer than six months.

However, in the three years since they were introduced, no EDMOs have been issued in Oxford — and only 17 have been used nationwide.

And Oxford City Council’s housing chief said the prospect of seizing vacant homes to ease the city’s housing shortage was unrealistic.

There are currently 5,000 people on the council’s housing waiting list, with a ‘homeless’ family in temporary accommodation facing at least a three-and-a-half year wait for a permanent council property.

In reality, the majority of those on the waiting list will never be housed as only 600 of the authority’s 7,900 homes become available each year.

The need for housing is so great that the city council offers existing tenants cash incentives to downsize in a new initiative called the Under Occupying Tenants Scheme (see left).

Head of housing Graham Stratford said: “It is extremely difficult to do enforcement on private empty properties.

“There are management orders, but there isn’t an order that says if a house is empty the owner has got to rent it out.

“All we have is the power to make them do the property up if it begins to affect the amenity level in the area and to nag them to get it up to a standard where someone will buy it or rent it from them.

“There’s one or two cases where we think the threat of an EDMO will get the person to move along, but it’s a very long, slow process and with a lot of these houses you would have to spend an absolute fortune to bring them back into use.

“EDMOs are unrealistic from a financial point of view as times are very tight,” he added.

Mr Stratford said in a city with such a large and transient student population, many landlords had legitimate reasons for houses that were empty for more than six months.

Residents in Wood Farm are angry the Marywood House building, a former 25-flat property for people with learning disabilities, has remained empty in Leiden Road for more than five years.

However, its owners, Oxfordshire County Council, said it was still exploring ways to bring the building back into use and it could be used to house community facilities as part of its redevelopment of the nearby Wood Farm Primary School.

City councillor Ed Turner, board member for housing, said: “There is a great deal of housing need in Oxford and it’s frustrating we can’t get people into these empty homes.

“The Government should provide greater support for issuing EDMOs.

“We can’t just have the council going round confiscating homes, but at the moment I don’t think the powers are tilted enough in favour of the council to be able to deal with these problems.”

Kerry Ashley-Morgan and her family represent the human face of Oxford’s housing shortage.

Miss Ashley-Morgan, 39, lives with her partner Danny McKinlay, a worker at Buildbase, and five of her six children in a three-bedroom council house in Cuddesdon Way, Blackbird Leys.

They joined the council’s housing register in November 2004 and had hoped to be re-housed to a larger property within a year.

Since that time, their youngest daughter, Darnah, three, was born and now the family’s four youngest children share one bedroom.

Miss Ashley-Morgan, a part-time youth worker, said: “We are desperate to get somewhere big enough to live. It’s just so crowded, it’s claustrophobic at times.

“The whole family cannot sit down for dinner together in the dining room and the conditions affect my children’s emotional well-being.

“They get stressed out when they don’t have room to play in the house because space is so limited. There are many times when I’ve been in tears because we can’t get somewhere big enough.” cwalker@oxfordmail.co.uk