MoD Wasting 25m a Year on Vacant Houses
With the growing concern of a housing shortage in the UK, its been announced this week that the MOD are wasting more than £25 million a year ‘sitting’ on unoccupied properties.
While the MoD defends its right to maintain some empty housing to accommodate the movements within the armed forces, the Liberal Democrats have slammed this by saying the number of vacant houses appear “extraordinarily high”.
These properties are costing taxpayers £28.78m a year in rent paid to a housing company, and another 11m can be added to that figure as the MoD rents another 1,884 properties from private landords!
Liberal Democrat Nick Harvey discovered at least 8,200 homes unoccupied, which represent 20 per cent of the married familes quarters. Annington Homes (A housing company which purchased more than 57,000 properties from the MoD in 1996) rent 41,000 of these vacant homes back to the MoD.
When the properties were sold in a £1.6 billion deal by the then Conservative government a stipulation was made that any surplus stock would be sold off by Annington Homes and the profits would then be shared with the Treasury.
Mr Harvey told the BBC "One accepts some will be empty while they're organising people to come and go, but it's an incredible percentage that a private sector operator could never sustain."
Mr Harvey said the figures were indicative of much wider failings by the government to honour the military covenant.
"The whole sorry saga of families' accommodation shows that the nation has not been keeping up its side of the bargain," he said.
Houses need to be Readily Available for Families.
Mr Twigg speaking on behalf of the MoD, also told the BBC "These are the number of properties we need to have because we need to make sure that people have properties to go to." He went on to say "As part of our military housing policy, we are committed to have houses readily available for families, when people need them so people do not have to wait for family houses."
The Government are now working to reduce the level of unoccupied properties and the MoD have held a review into the level of empty homes in the UK and are working to reduce the level of vacant properties.
Surely some of these homes could be used on short terms leases – this at least would bring some revenue into the MoD coffers as well as helping those that need short term housing?
