Will the Minister outline what plans the Welsh Government has to bring the over 100,000 completely vacant homes back into use?
The latest statistics for 2023/24 show that there are 22,457 chargeable empty properties (empty for more than 6 months) in Wales.
Welsh Government has introduced a number of measures and funding packages in order to reduce the number of long-term empty homes in Wales.
An investment of up to £50 million is being made available to bring up to 2,000 long-term empty properties back into use through our empty homes grant scheme. This funding will accelerate our work to bring empty properties back into use and complement our existing schemes. This includes the nearly £43m of recyclable funding we have provided to local authorities to enable them to provide interest-free property loans for landlords and homeowners for home improvements or to renovate empty properties and bring them back into use. The loans have been used to bring back around 1,850 units into use from empty properties across Wales, and supported improvements to around a further 1,700 occupied homes.
In addition, we have given local authorities powers to charge council tax premiums of up to 300% on long-term empty dwellings.
We are also supporting local authorities to use the full range of legislative powers at their disposal to tackle empty properties, including providing training to more than 850 councillors and officials across all local authorities in Wales on using enforcement measures to deal with empty properties.
This work is being carried out in collaboration with Siân Gwenllian, the Plaid Cymru lead designated member, as part of the Co-operation Agreement between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru.