A council home which has been sitting empty for around two years will finally be put back into use. Complaints from a neighbour have led to the council making repairs to the proerty and a new family are expected to move in this month.
Neighbours had noticed the Greenbank property was empty during the start of the pandemic in 2020 but were unaware the house was owned by Bristol City Council as most homes in the area are privately owned. One local resident, who did not wish to be named but works for a housing charity and walks past the house daily, said the last time he had seen anyone entering the property was before the first lockdown.
He said he had written to the council about the property several months ago. The concerned neighbour said he finds it "particularly distasteful" that the property had been left empty for so long because of the all families facing homelessness he has to deal with on a daily basis as part of his job role.
READ MORE: Empty homes in Bristol exceed 1,100 with hundreds still empty after years
Bristol City Council say Covid-19 had resulted in delays to the renovation of the property. The council had been using the property for temporary accommodation in 2019 and had leased it out to a registered housing provider.
The neighbour said: "As the months dragged on I thought, ‘I wonder who owns this place, how can they afford to leave it vacant?’ It was only in the last few months that I found out it was a council property.
"I reported it myself and the only acknowledgement I got was, ‘we’ve received your report and someone will look into that.’ Nobody actually got in touch. I can see that they’ve been doing some work on it in the last few days.
"That’s a really poor show that a two to three bed house has been left vacant when they could have provided emergency accommodation for so many families. Knowing personally how difficult it is in parts of the country where whole families are being evicted for no reason by landlords and a house has been left for this amount of time when it’s owned by us, essentially.
“Especially when I took the time to report it several months ago and it’s only by luck that I knew someone who could follow it through. That’s just one example, I can only imagine what’s happening in the rest of Bristol and the rest of the country.
“Why are these houses being left to rot? The house looks alright from the outside, it isn’t in such a poor state of disrepair. Leaving it empty for that period of time is not going to make issues of disrepair any better.
“The sooner you fix it, the better. If you allow damp or leaks to fester for that amount of time, it’s going to be a more expensive problem than if you take action straight away.
“Because of what I’ve been doing as a job, I find it particularly distasteful. We can’t allow these sorts of things to continue, we pay tax, we pay council tax and our government department should be administering the funds we pay a lot more responsibly.
“We really need to look after what we’ve paid for and look after the people who really need the help and there’s a lot of them out there. This level of irresponsibility shouldn’t be allowed to continue; they really need to take notice of where their properties are, what state they are in and not allow them to be vacant for that length of time.”
A council spokesperson said, "The property was leased to a registered provider in 2019 and was used for temporary accommodation. Due to COVID we experienced some delays in renovating properties and returning them to use.
"During this time, we were concentrating on supporting in excess of 100 plus household in homeless temporary accommodation plus bringing 500 homes back into use to provide more homes for the people of Bristol. The property has now undergone the work needed to make it ready to relet, and a family will be moving in a fortnight's time.
“As well as supporting landlords to find a suitable tenant and write up tenancy agreements, we incentivise reletting of homes. Through Lendology, Bristol properties have benefited from some of the £17 million lent to South West homeowners for repairs, improvements, and energy efficiency/renewable energy measures, with deferred options to give owners space to rent, sell, or move in before repayments start.
“These services have meant most empty properties are reoccupied within two years. This compares to us reletting empty council homes requiring extensive major works on average within 77 days – less than two and a half months – as of December 2021. Last year the Council relet 1,081 homes, despite the challenges around people moving house during the pandemic.”
