Weaponness and Ramshill Residents; Empty Homes in the Ward - 5. Progress at NYC. I have some good news this morning.

Following my question about Empty Homes to the Scarborough and Whitby Area Committee we have movement.

The question was:
I would like to raise my concern that North Yorkshire Council has lost focus on dealing with Scarborough’s Long Term Empty Homes problem and it is affecting where I live.

Can the council:
Tell us how many empty properties there are in our area with the latest information? The latest publicly easily searchable information is 5 years old.
The result of the question was that the Housing and Leisure Overview & Scrutiny Committee added the issue of empty homes be placed on its work programme. They noted that NYC housing officers have a developed understanding and expertise of the issues. Many of them are former SBC officers who understand the level of need.
They say that NYC has got a data roundup programme to collate all the disparate information on empty homes before developing a strategy.

My campaign objective is to persuade NYC to speed this up - a lot - and see how best practices from other UK Councils might assist creating a vision in NYC.

Today I'm also going to submit a list of long term well-known Weaponness and Ramshill empty properties to the NYC facility we currently have to see if we can get movement on these.

A good start to the day!

Chris Clark, Labour Councillor for Weaponness and Ramshill.