14. What assessment he has made of the rate of change in the number of empty homes since May 2010. (906622)

The number of homes empty for more than six months is now at its lowest level since records began. This Government have achieved a year-on-year reduction in long-term empty homes through council tax incentives such as the new homes bonus, opportunities to increase council tax and a Government programme of £200 million for empty homes funding.

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is totally perverse that Labour-run Kirklees council continues to forge ahead with building homes on greenfield sites when there are thousands of empty properties and numerous brownfield sites in my beautiful part of west Yorkshire?

The national planning policy framework does indeed incentivise local authorities to bring forward brownfield sites first, and the Government want 90% of suitable brownfield land to have permissions in place through local development orders by 2020. With regard to my hon. Friend’s local authority in Kirklees, there are 718 long-term empties for which it charges the council tax premium, raising £387,000. If it worked with the owners to bring those properties back into use, it would get £783,000 in new homes bonus this year, plus £4.7 million over the full six years that the funding is available.

From the Minister’s response, we might think that everything is perfect in the garden, but the Office for National Statistics has shown that over 1 million homes are still empty. At the same time there are record numbers of people in this country wanting to rent affordable homes. What is he going to do to ensure that local authorities that are not using their powers to bring empty homes back into use now do so in order to end this absolute scandal of homelessness and empty homes in Britain?

I do not recognise the figure that the hon. Gentleman cites, but I will have a look at it. My information is that in England the overall number of vacant properties has fallen from the 770,000 when we came into office to 635,000 now. I write constantly to local authorities to remind them of the suite of powers available for bringing empty homes back into use, and I have gone on a series of visits across the country to encourage social enterprises, in particular—I have visited Leeds Empties, for example—to work with the community in order to achieve the double benefit of bringing a home back into use and getting some social enterprise spin-off benefit.