This all seems a little swift to be honest
That there needs to be some period beyond which a local council can insist upon a property being repaired at least, if not reused, seems sensible enough to us. One of us, a couple of decades back, marvelled at decaying houses in the expensive streets outside Lisbon. The rotting teeth in the rows were the result of the supporters of - and gainers from - the Estado Novo deciding another country would be a good idea after the 1974 revolution. They might well have been right too. But it did mean those mansions were uninhabited, unmaintained, and after 35 years were desperately in need of at least one of those two. There was no method by which their use or maintenance could be forced, then the law was changed. As with the old rules about squatters rights in England - if you’d not paid attention to a property for 7 years, well, it does need to be brought back into circulation and therefore. Yes to the inviolability of property rights and yet. We are, after all, extreme pragmatists around here.
Labour has been accused of threatening property rights after giving councils the power to seize empty homes after six months.
Ministers are cutting the period a property must be vacant before local authorities can take control from two years to six months.
The property will remain privately owned, but councils can take control through an Empty Dwelling Management Order, which allows them to take over its management and rent it out for up to seven years.
6 months does not seem long enough. The aim is to:
There were 303,185 properties vacant for at least six months in October 2025, up 14.5pc from 264,884 a year earlier. Long-term empty homes accounted for 1.2pc of England’s housing stock.
That figure includes properties left vacant for a range of reasons, including homes awaiting probate, undergoing renovation or being prepared for sale.
The recent familial experience of one of us. The vicissitudes of age lead to entry into a care home in October last year, death occurs in February. Probate granted in early September this year and the house sale set up to go through the day after probate is granted. It does so. That’s 11 months of an empty house. Well, other than children turning up to then visit in the care home etc. That’s a house potentially at risk of seizure by the local council. Is that what is actually desired? That such a thing is even possible? No, leave aside how likely it is as yet - power taken by government is power that will be used by government.
It’s not advised to sell the house while awaiting the easily predicted death - if there’s no house in the estate how does the inheritance tax relief for a house work? It is not possible to sell the house while the estate is in probate. How long probate takes is the usual tale of bureaucracy but according to those who do this for a living the greatest delays usually come from the local councils - trying to get the documents to show that no money is owed to them. Getting probate on a taxable estate in under 6 months is, again from those who know, regarded as doing pretty well.
That the government can confiscate a house while it is the government’s own bureaucracy that prevents anyone doing anything else with the house than wait seems a less than optimal time span, to be fair about it.
This is, we suggest, one of those issues where there’s no wholly acceptable answer. Yes, the inviolability of property rights and yet there really are orphan assets out there - that we have intestacy laws shows we’re all aware of that possibility. But that the state gets to nick a house in less time than it takes the mills of the state’s own bureaucracy to grind small? No.
Tim Worstall
A touch of extra, added, piquancy to this. If you empty a house in order to sell it and the sale does not go through - one of these things that does, regrettably, happen - then you cannot re-rent it for 12 months. So, this new law in fact says that government can steal your house for not doing what the government insists is illegal. Non-optimal.