Originally published March 2022.

Write anything about housing and you’ll usually be hit with a classic non-gotcha: “What about empty homes?”. What about those supposed millions of properties that lie unused? Surely all we need is to allocate those homes and our housing woes will go away.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the argument is nonsense. In 2020 there were an estimated 270,000 ‘long-term empty’ dwellings in England. This accounts for about 1% of the whole UK housing stock – an extremely low level compared to a normal housing market. Indeed, England actually has the lowest share of unoccupied homes in Europe. We need to add at least 300,000 homes per year to have even a chance of solving the crisis so at best the ‘but empty homes’ squad have an answer to just one year of supply. 

But it’s not just that there aren’t actually millions of empty homes that means this argument fails – it’s also entirely economically illiterate. 

Let’s start by looking at where the empty dwellings are. As one would expect, they’re overwhelmingly in the North, where housing demand is much lower.  In 2019, 1.5% of the housing stock in the North-East was long-term vacant compared to just 0.7% in London and the South-East. What the empty homes brigade are therefore suggesting is that people don’t live where they actually want to, but are instead shipped off to other areas – either by diktat or economic circumstance.