Hundreds of Southampton council houses sitting empty

About 390 council houses are currently empty in Southampton, the council's director of housing has revealed

Hundreds of council houses in a city are sitting empty for months, figures show.

The number of unoccupied properties in Southampton City Council's housing stock peaked at 446 in January.

Councillors were told that the voids had started to fall in recent months, but it would take time to see significant improvements.

Director of housing Jamie Brenchley said at least four homes a week were coming back into a rentable condition.

The overall target was to have between 25 and 50 empty properties, Mr Benchley said.

But that falls short of the current number, which stands at 390.

He added that, over the next 12 months, it was realistic to aim to halve the number of empty council homes to below 200.

For empty council houses that need major work, it takes about 278 days to get them into a lettable condition

Consultants had helped to carry out a review and develop a detailed plan to improve performance, council documents showed.

"The focus is on long-term improvements and we are unlikely to see trends reduce until later in 2024," the report said.

The time taken to get empty homes back into a condition that they could be let has increased over the past year, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Twelve months ago, the average was 94 days for properties requiring routine work and 225 days for major works.

At the end of last month, these figures stood at 133 days and 278 days, respectively.

The council report said: "This is the trend we would expect to see. Long-term voids are being tackled and brought back into use."

At a meeting members of the governance committee raised concerns about the quality of the empty homes project plan that was presented to them.

Mr Brenchley was asked if effort was being made to streamline the building trades process involved in carrying out work on empty council houses.

The officer said no other authorities used individual specialist tradespeople like the city council did.

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