Empty Homes and Voids Action Plan 2024 — 2030
Our new Housing Strategy 2024 to 2030 sets out a framework to deliver more and better housing for residents.
It has three key priority themes, one of which is to deliver more affordable homes. This means that Lambeth will lead the way in providing more genuinely affordable homes for our residents, including making better use of the existing homes in the borough.
Empty and void homes represent an opportunity for Lambeth to meet high demand for housing across the borough and to make more effective use of the resources we have.
There are many different types of ‘empty home’, each with their own obstacles to being brought back into formal tenancy or permanent occupation. Some are considerably more complex, costly or difficult to act against.
This includes some properties exempt from enforcement under national legislation, such as the homes of those who are currently in care, serving in the armed forces or in hospital.
The level of control the council has to bring empty properties back into use depends on the ownership of the property as well as the reasons why it remains empty. We are committed to taking all action possible to address empty homes and voids. We recognise how important bringing homes back into use is for our residents and communities.
We have published the Empty Homes and Voids Action Plan to summarise the strengthened actions being taken across our different services to deliver this.
Download the Empty Homes and Voids Action plan Autumn 2024 (PDF, 371KB)
We will update this action plan annually, to demonstrate to residents the progress we are making towards making better use of Lambeth’s existing homes and to identify new actions on empty homes and voids as the legal and economic context changes.
Empty homes and voids quarterly reporting
We have committed to publishing quarterly data updates on key empty homes and voids categories based on the council’s statistics, to provide a consistent record of the number of empty homes and voids in Lambeth.
Figures will routinely fluctuate as empty homes and voids change status. However, totals from a specific point in time are still useful to provide an indication of the scale of empty homes and voids in Lambeth.