Lib Dems Demand Answers On Reading's Empty Homes — Performance Data Kept Secret For Five Years

Liberal Democrat councillors in Reading have submitted a formal question to the Lead Councillor for Housing, demanding that the council publicly disclose for the first time how many empty homes it has brought back into use since its Empty Homes Strategy was adopted in 2020.

A councillor enquiry has established that, despite the strategy setting a public target of bringing 30 long-term empty homes back into use each year, performance against that target has never been reported to any committee or published in any public document. Instead, updates have been provided only through private Lead Councillor briefings — meaning residents, scrutiny committees, and opposition councillors have had no visibility of whether the council has been meeting its own targets for five years.

The question, submitted by Cllr James Moore, Liberal Democrat Councillor for Tilehurst Ward, asks the Lead Councillor for Housing to confirm how many empty properties have been brought back into use in each year of the strategy, whether the annual target of 30 homes has been met, how much revenue has been raised through empty homes council tax premiums since April 2024, and what that revenue has been spent on.

It also calls on the Lead Councillor to commit to publishing annual performance data on empty homes as a matter of routine going forward.

Cllr James Moore said:

"Reading has over 1,400 homes sitting empty or unused, and the council set itself a public target five years ago to start tackling that. But when we asked how they were performing against that target, we discovered the data has never been made public — it's been shared only in private briefings with the Lead Councillor. That is not good enough. Residents deserve to know whether their council is delivering on its promises, and scrutiny committees deserve the information they need to hold the administration to account. We are calling for that data to be published now, and for transparency to be built into the successor strategy from the outset."

The question comes after Reading's Liberal Democrats published research revealing the scale of the borough's empty homes problem, based on the latest Government Council Taxbase data. The research also highlighted that Citizens UK Reading had called on council leaders at their recent Accountability Assembly to refresh, renew, and reinvigorate the Empty Homes Strategy.

The council has since confirmed that a revised Empty Homes Strategy for the 2027–2032 period is in preparation and will be brought to committee. Reading's Liberal Democrats will be pressing for that strategy to include meaningful public targets, ringfenced funding from the empty homes premium, and a commitment to annual public reporting on performance.