At least 5,500 properties owned by the London councils are unoccupied, more than 3,000 of which have been vacant for three months or more, revealed Evening Standard last week. Here are some numbers:

Borough Council Homes Number Empty Squatted in 2009
Barking & Dagenham 19,558 152 3
Barnet 10,900 229 5
Bromley 17,500 0
Camden 32,879 485 4
City of London 2,760 4 0
Croydon 14,021 129 0
Enfield 16,419 302 12
Greenwich 24,011 575 6
Hackney 22,702 235 30
Haringey 16,157 223 21
Hounslow 13,447 252 4
Islington 25,603 49
Kensington & Chelsea 6,944 117 2
Lambeth 26,421 1,090 100
Lewisham 18,000 490 18
Merton 6,334 48 1
Redbridge 4,600 60 3
Sutton 6,325 68 0
Tower Hamlets 21,612 326 121
Waltham Forest 10,525 222
Wandsworth 17,000 178 3
Westminster 25,307 417 10

Now Ealing council is planning to launch a scheme that gives young people the opportunity to jump the queue for affordable housing if they agree to learn renovation skills. The council will identify privately owned properties which have been left unoccupied for more than three months.

Sounds like a full time job!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 11:21 am and is filed under Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.