In our August newsletter, we were pleased to feature a guest article from the Scottish Empty Homes Partnership (SEHP), a charity which provides free support and advice to property owners and communities affected by vacant properties. In this article, written by Matthew Griffiths from the SEHP, learn about their services and how they’re helping to bring Scotland’s approximately 46,000 privately owned long-term empty homes back into use.

Since its creation in 2010, we have contributed to bringing approximately 10,000 homes back into use. This has been achieved by advocating for the mainstreaming of empty homes work in every local authority and supporting the network of Empty Homes Officers that have been employed as a result.

We also run the Empty Homes Advice Service (EHAS), where owners of empty homes, neighbours of empty homes, and people looking to invest in empty homes can contact us for free, impartial advice on the obstacles they might be facing to bring an empty home back into use. As well as supporting people via phone and email, our website contains a variety of useful tools and resources to enable people to deal with the empty homes issues they are facing.

Examples of the types of advice we can provide include:

• For owners, financing empty home renovations or options for selling or renting out an empty home
• Neighbours and community members can report empty homes to us for investigation and use our handy Neighbour Toolkit to guide them through steps they can take to ensure homes in their communities don’t remain empty – this includes advice on topics like disrepair, anti-social behaviour, and problems relating to environmental health

Just this month, we supported the owner of an empty home to access a grant via their council to facilitate the renovation of their property, which they had inherited. We also helped the neighbour of an empty tenement that was causing problems in their community liaise with their Empty Homes Officer to identify the owner and contact them to remind them of their responsibilities. This led to the owner taking action to repair damaged render which was falling into a communal garden.

We also work with a wide network of organisations that share our aims of bringing empty properties back into use. See pictures below of a renovation of a long-term empty tenement carried out by our partners, the social enterprise letting agency, Homes For Good.

If you own, or are being impacted by, an empty home and would like to find out more about what support is available, then please contact the Empty Home Advice Service at emptyhomes@shelter.org.uk or 0344 515 1941, or head to their website at Advice Service | Scottish Empty Homes Partnership.