New financial incentives are needed to bring thousands of empty homes back into use and give a much-needed boost to the rental sector or the owner occupier market.

Propertymark, the professional body for agents, is renewing its call for the UK government to restart the Empty Homes Programme which closed in 2015, having distributed £100m.

Alongside that, it wants to see other long-term financial incentives including removing VAT on home and energy efficiency improvements as well as discounts or exemptions to council tax and stamp duty when empty properties are purchased and utilised.

The organisation says measures in the Levelling Up White Paper to address the issue are welcome, but ministers are being urged to go even further and explore a scheme that targets owners of empty homes.

This would be similar to the scheme in the in the White Paper that sets out an intention to give councils powers that will place a requirement on landlords to find tenants for long-term vacant commercial properties in town and city centres. This would compel owners to use the property to live in, rent out or sell it.

Latest data from Action on Empty Homes shows the number of long-term empty homes in England stands at 238,306 — that’s 20 per cent higher than at the end of the last national Empty Homes Programme.

The UK government has a target of building 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s. The most recent data for the year ending September 2021 shows 228,370 new build homes were completed.

Lack of supply in both the sales and rental markets is a major issue for the property market, with Propertymark member agents reporting high demand outstripping historically low supply.

Timothy Douglas, head of policy and campaigns for Propertymark, comments: “Empty homes are a wasted resource and at a time when the housing market is in the grip of unsustainably low levels of stock for sale and for rent, it makes no sense that there are thousands of homes sitting vacant.

“We have long called for the reintroduction of a national programme of funding because of the much-needed incentive that it can provide to get these properties back into the market for would-be home buyers or landlords.

“The UK government has set itself a target of building 300,000 new houses a year, but it must not miss opportunities to do more to better manage the growing level of existing housing stock that is currently being underused, or not used at all.”