Questions still hanging over Empty Homes scheme

ROSSENDALE Council’s Empty Homes nightmare continues to go on.

This, readers may remember, was the scheme Rossendale Council agreed to lead across East Lancashire, using government money to bring houses in poor condition back into regular use. A noble scheme – but an expensive one after the company the council hired to run the project went out of business, leaving Rossendale carrying the can.

Investigations have been taken into what happened, but precious little information has been shared to reassure taxpayers that it couldn’t happen again.

Rossendale’s cabinet meets for the first time in public since March this week, and finance is high on the agenda.

The Empty Homes Scheme stands out in the finance report. In the 2016/2017 budget, the council estimated it would spend £200k on the Empty Homes Scheme.

According to the finance report, it spent £1.3m – a variance of £1.1m.

For a council with a regular budget of around £9m, this is a big difference!

It’s a very complex issue, of course, but also one which many people are very familiar with.

And many people also want answers – top of the list for me would be where that £1.1m is coming from, and what, if anything, has been put on hold to release the money for this.

Rossendale Council has said it would learn the lessons of the Empty Homes crisis – but we don’t really know, despite two independent reports, what those lessons really are.