Wiltshire Council leader's anger at MoD as 1,350 military homes lie empty for years
https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2022-05-10/anger-at-mod-as-1350-military-homes-lie-empty-for-years
West Country, Housing, Wiltshire Council Tuesday 10 May 2022
The leader of Wiltshire Council has described 1,350 empty military homes in the county as a "scandal" as more than 2,000 families wait for social housing.The empty homes, many of which have multiple bedrooms and large gardens, are dotted around civilian communities.The Ministry of Defence rents them from a private company, Amey, but council tax records show they have been empty for several years."I honestly think it's a scandal," leader of Wiltshire Council Richard Clewer told ITV News West Country."Taxpayers are spending money to keep properties empty, and I'm having to see green fields built on when we could be housing people in these empty homes."There is huge pressure on Wiltshire's social housing stock.Houses in Chippenham, Trowbridge and Salisbury attract more than 100 bids each and there are currently 2,400 families are waiting for one of the council's 5,000 properties.Some of the empty homes are falling into disrepair. The council is also building around 2,000 homes a year, many on greenfield land, to keep up with general housing demand.The Ministry of Defence told ITV News it keeps enough empty homes across the UK to enable 16,000 service families to be moved at short notice each year.It said it does hand back surplus homes where possible.
How the MoD’s plan to privatise military housing ended in disasterIn 1996, the Ministry of Defence decided to sell off its housing stock. The financier Guy Hands bought it up in a deal that would make his investors billions – and have catastrophic consequences for both the military and the taxpayerby Holly WattTue 25 Apr 2017 05.30 BSTLast modified on Tue 30 Jan 2018 11.32 GMTIn the village of St Eval, a former RAF base in Cornwall, the streets are named after aeroplanes. There is a Lancaster Crescent, a Lincoln Row, a Botha Road. The former officers’ houses are grand and generous, looking out over the village green. Other houses look west, across fields, towards the rough Cornish coastline. Spitfires once whipped down the runway, which now lies abandoned. “It’s a lovely place to live,” one resident, Trevor Windsor, told me last autumn, as he prodded at his pretty front garden. “You just hear the lawnmowers every so often, and the birds singing and the children up at the school. It’s a bucolic idyll, you might say.”Two decades ago, this idyll was disrupted by the noisy arrival of a lorry. Residents watched on as a team of builders proceeded to knock down the walls of one of the village houses, leaving the roof intact. “They lifted up the house roof,” remembered resident Barbara Hough. “Then bricked up the walls and put the roof back on top. They did that, one house after the next, all the way up Halifax Road.”Terra Firma boss Guy Hands.MoD lost up to £4.2bn through sale of military homes, says audit officeRead moreA few months earlier, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had sold all of its military housing in St Eval to a company named Annington Homes. This was part of a much larger nationwide deal, in which Annington paid the MoD £1.67bn for 57,400 properties that housed military servicemen and their families. In one swoop, Annington became the biggest residential property owner in England and Wales.For the MoD, the deal solved a mounting problem: tens of thousands of military homes across the country were falling apart, and the department didn’t have the budget to repair them. By selling the homes, the MoD hoped to make some quick money, while freeing up cash for renovation. After the sale, the MoD would then rent back the homes at a discounted rate....
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/apr/25/mod-privatise-military-housing-disaster-guy-hands
