Britain needs to build more homes rather than focusing on vacant housing

7 April 2025, 17:13

Given the severity of Britain’s housing crisis, it is not surprising that people are outraged when they hear about vacant properties. It just feels wrong to leave a property empty and unused when so many other people are struggling to find a place to stay.

Tapping into that sentiment, Westminster City Council now wants additional powers so that they can take over empty homes. But if we look at the numbers, it quickly becomes clear that this is a complete non-issue.

For a start, England already has one of the lowest rates of vacant housing in the developed world. The vacancy rate is never zero: there is no country in the world where every single dwelling is occupied all the time. But Britain already comes closer than most.

About 2.7% of the English housing stock are empty at any given moment. But two out of three empty housing units are not empty for long. It is just that every time someone vacates a property, and the next occupier does not move in immediately afterwards, the property is counted as “empty”.

Only 0.9% of the English housing stock is left vacant for longer periods, and Westminster council is perfectly in line with the national average on this measure. The Westminster rate use to be even lower than, but there was a jump after 2021, which was probably a pandemic effect that we can expect to wear off again.

Empty homes are a rounding error. The much bigger issue is that Britain has not been building nearly enough homes for half a century or longer, and now has one of the lowest levels of housing supply in the developed world. Local authorities often reject planning application on spurious grounds in order to placate local NIMBYs, and Westminster Council is not exception here. Just a few months ago, they tried to block the construction of a student hall of residence in the Paddington area, on the grounds that it would create a “sense of enclosure”. Maybe it would, but this is Zone 1 in the capital city – of course it is not going to look like Shanklin, Isle of Wight!

The idea that the government should send inspectors around, to check whether some homeowners spend more time away from their property than the government thinks they should, reveals a defeatist, miserabilist mindset. Once we start obsessing about who occupies their property for how many days per year, we have effectively given up on solving London’s housing crisis.

We should not. We’re not talking about colonising Mars here. It’s not that complicated; we literally just need to put some bricks on top of other bricks. All policymakers need to do is override NIMBY objections, and get out of the way.

I want to see a 2020s version of the great 1930s’ building boom, which made London the city it is today. London was able to do it then, and it could do it again today.

Dr Kristian Niemietz is the Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

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