Councils are compulsorily purchasing empty properties to meet a surge in the number of asylum seekers being granted leave to remain in the UK.
Council chiefs have complained they are not being given enough time to find alternative accommodation for successful asylum seekers because of the Home Office’s faster decision-making to clear huge backlogs of cases.
The policy has been highlighted by the plight of an elderly couple who were told they had to give up their home to asylum seekers because of a shortage of suitable accommodation.
Jose and Ted Saunders said they were “shocked” to be told by North Northamptonshire Council that their mid-terraced house in Rushden, near Wellingborough, was deemed to be empty or derelict, enabling the authority to force them to sell it.
The letter said the council was seeing a “considerable increase” in positive immigration decisions being made in favour of asylum seekers, mainly single men, and the authority was “struggling” to source suitable accommodation for them.
It added: “The ideal long-term solution would be to provide accommodation by using empty properties which would benefit owners and the project.” It said the council could make a compulsory purchase order on the property.
Council chiefs said they had to adopt such tactics because of the faster processing of asylum claims by the Home Office. “In terms of trying to acquire more social housing, councils will adopt a variety of measures, one of them being identifying empty properties that they can bring back into use,” said a senior council source.
‘Utterly shocking’
Three days after receiving the letter, the Saunders got an apology, saying council staff had mistakenly earmarked the house for possible compulsory purchase.
However, the Saunders were still baffled by the policy itself. “What on earth is the council doing forcing people to sell their houses – and even an empty house is owned by someone – so that asylum seekers can live in them?” said Jose. “The answer to this is to stop them coming in the first place, not to force people out of their homes.”
The incident was seized upon by the Reform UK Party, whose candidate in Thursday’s Wellingborough by-election, Ben Habib, heard about the case.
Mr Habib, who is also the party’s co-deputy leader, said: “I was horrified to hear the plight of Mr and Mrs Saunders.
‘It is utterly shocking that the council would fire off a letter like that to two elderly people. And do so with the aim of buying a £200,000 house for asylum seekers. This from a council that is as good as bust and has never filed consolidated accounts since it was established in 2021.”
It comes after The Telegraph revealed on Tuesday that the Home Office has quietly built up a stock of 16,000 properties for asylum seekers despite acute shortages of homes for young workers and families.
Contractors working for the Home Office are offering landlords five-year guaranteed full rent deals to take over the management of properties as they race to transfer asylum seekers out of hotels.
The properties drawn from the private rental and social housing markets are being used to house more than 58,000 asylum seekers across England, Wales and Scotland. That is double the 29,000 asylum seekers in the so-called “dispersed accommodation” a decade ago.
‘A mechanism of last resort’
Jason Smithers, Leader of North Northamptonshire Council, told the Daily Mail in a statement: “North Northamptonshire Council (NNC) is working with owners of long-term empty properties to bring their property back into use.
“Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) are not utilised to ‘oust’ current owners from their properties, they are a tool used as a very last resort to bring empty properties, which are a valuable and much need housing resource, back into use.
“The ‘empty property initiative letters’ were sent out in a bid to assist empty property owners bring their property back into use, and on the whole, the support from NNC was gratefully received.
“Since NNC formed in 2021, no properties have been purchased by CPO. This is a mechanism of last resort to bring problematic, long-term empty properties back into use.
“Unfortunately, in this case, records held by NNC were outdated, and the letter was incorrectly sent to a property which was occupied. For this, I am very sorry for causing any undue distress and worry.”
