Plenty of room for thousands of homeless says National Home Improvement Council

According to the National Home Improvement Council (NHIC) there is ample room to accommodate many of the thousands of homeless people outlined in the special report by the charity Crisis! It says that around 630,000 homes are over-crowded with the worst hit areas being London and the South East.

Andrew Leech, executive director NHIC, points out that: “There are nearly 800,000 homes around the country which could be turned into very comfortable, highly energy efficient accommodation for the thousands of homeless people mentioned in the admirable Crisis report.

“Also, there are many commercial properties such as offices and shops standing idle which lend themselves ideally to improvement as new, efficient and less costly-to-run homes for people seeking a roof over their head.

“With the downturn in some leisure-time activities, in addition there are now available many large, rambling old pubs which could be converted into homes to provide many three or four, one or two-bedroom homes for people urgently seeking accommodation. And, of course, these buildings all have readymade car parking space.’
Look down virtually any high street in the UK and you can find many ‘redundant’ retail or office premises which could easily be adapted for change of use under the terms of the proposed new planning legislation.

Andrew Leech says: “There is a lot of potential and incentive to ‘resurrect’ these buildings and return them to the community to help solve our current and future housing demands!”
It’s a daunting prospect but unless our empty homes improvement potential is implemented, the Crisis report says more families will be ‘forced to share an ever decreasing number of homes.’
It makes the important point that the government’s ‘affordable’ housing building programme ‘is likely to generate fewer than 50,000 homes by 2015, well short of the 80,000 required to meet targets.’
This make is all the more important that existing, energy efficient and less costly-to-run homes are created from amongst buildings already standing empty.

NHIC PR 10.9.11 (PDF)