Government shortens empty homes rule - but will councils actually use it?

The government has announced changes to the rules that let local councils seize control of long-term empty homes, cutting the qualifying wait from two years to just six months. It sounds like a decisive fix for Britain’s stock of boarded-up houses. The reality is more modest: this is a tweak to an obscure legal tool that councils have historically barely touched.

What’s actually changing

The tool in question is the Empty Dwelling Management Order, or EDMO, which lets a local authority take over the management of a vacant property - not ownership, just management - and get it occupied again for up to seven years. The owner keeps the title throughout.

Under the announcement from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, a home now only needs to have stood empty for six months, rather than two years, before a council can start the process. The government is also stripping out some of the evidential hoops councils previously had to jump through, such as proving anti-social behaviour or demonstrating community support, when applying to the Residential Property Tribunal for an order.

That’s the entirety of what’s confirmed here. There’s no new funding announced, no timetable for when councils must start using the power, and no legislation text published alongside the press release for us to check the wording against. The government also says it is “exploring further changes” to the regime - which is bureaucratic shorthand for nothing decided yet.

So who is actually affected

Owners of homes that have sat genuinely vacant for six months or more are now, in principle, exposed to council intervention sooner than before. That’s a real change for that group. But EDMOs have historically been used sparingly - councils have full discretion over whether to pursue one, and the process still runs through the Residential Property Tribunal, which takes time and resource. Shortening the qualifying period does nothing to change whether a council has the staff, budget or appetite to actually chase these cases.

For anyone renting or buying a home in the ordinary market, this changes nothing directly. It’s not a mechanism for building new housing or making existing homes cheaper; it’s a narrower tool aimed specifically at long-term vacant properties, and only where a council decides to act.

The gap between the claim and the evidence

The government’s framing - that this will “bring more long-term empty homes back into use” - is a prediction, not a measured outcome. No figures are given for how many additional properties this is expected to affect, and no evaluation of the previous two-year threshold’s track record is included in the release. Given that EDMOs have long been criticised as underused even under the old rules, a shorter waiting period addresses only one part of the problem - it doesn’t touch council capacity or willingness to use the power at all.

The takeaway

This is a real, checkable rule change to a real legal mechanism, not empty rhetoric - but it’s a small lever, not a housing fix. Whether it meaningfully dents England’s empty homes total depends entirely on what individual councils choose to do with it, and that’s the bit nobody can verify yet.