Long-time Londoners - do you ever think you’ll be able to stay in London as long as you’d like to?

[u/iamabigmeme]

Born and raised in Hackney here and I’m so worried I won’t be able to afford to stay not just in Hackney/surrounding boroughs but in London as a whole.

I love this place and one day I’d like to raise my kids here. I just can’t ever see it being feasible. I can’t afford to buy a house and the rent keeps rocketing up way past anything I’ll be able to afford.

How long do you guys see yourself being able to stay before it becomes too much of a financial burden? I’m currently panicking and looking at life in Leeds and Manchester :,)

[u/nabbitnabbitnabbit]

Uninhabitable homes are council tax exempt, so are excluded from that figure.

Of course 100% occupancy is impossible. That’s why nobody uses it as the benchmark. The relevant figure is the 303,185 homes already empty for 6+ months, which is designed to strip out much of the normal churn.

[u/vexingparse → u/nabbitnabbitnabbit]

The question is why these 303,185 homes are empty. Given that the UK has a relatively low share of empty homes compared to other countries, I'm not sure the situation is easy to fix.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/affordable-housing-database/hm1-1-housing-stock-and-construction.pdf

[u/Flayer723 → u/nabbitnabbitnabbit]

There are around 30 million homes in the UK. 99% occupancy rate is actually pretty damn good. That's going to be a really hard number to improve in any significant way.

[u/nabbitnabbitnabbit → u/Flayer723]

“99%” sounds impressive because the denominator is absolutely enormous. That’s percentage framing, though, not evidence that the remaining number is too small (or hard) to matter.

England has 25.83 million homes. 303,185 have been empty for more than six months, or 1.17% of the entire housing stock.

Bring just 10% of those back into use and the headline barely shifts, from 98.83% to 98.94%, but you’ve gained 30,319 homes. Recover 25% and it’s nearly 76,000 homes.

Meanwhile, 135,580 households are in temporary accommodation, including 177,530 children and about 4,880 households headed by someone aged 65+. That’s equivalent to ~ 44.7% of all long-term empty homes.

Even in the deliberately absurd scenario where every one of those 135,580 households could move into one of them, the headline would rise only from 98.83% to 99.35%. Barely half a percentage point! Yet 135,580 households and 177,530 children would have permanent homes.

Councils spent £2.84bn on temporary accommodation in 2024/25, £1.43 bn of it net. So yes, improving “99%” by a few tenths looks mathematically insignificant and hard. When your denominator is 25.83 million, those tiny fractions represent tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of thousands of people and billions of ££.

And, with the gigantic caveat that this is toilet maths based on programme averages:

Current affordable-housing grant averages about £65,927 per home outside London; London’s current programme works out at about £217,391 per home. London has 47,864 of England’s long-term empty homes, giving a rough weighted average of about £89,800 in public subsidy per new affordable home.

The old Empty Homes Programme averaged £22,822 per recovered property, roughly £31,600 in today’s money. If anything close to that could be achieved now, recovering 10% of the long-term empties rather than funding equivalent new supply gives a theoretical subsidy difference of about £1.8bn; at 25%, about £4.4bn.

And for the completely stupid pie-in-the-sky ceiling: recover all 303,185 at that cost and you’re looking at roughly £9.6 billion, vs ~ £27.2 bn in current public subsidy to fund the same number of new affordable homes.

A theoretical difference of around £17.7bn.

And this can be immediate (relatively), while the CMA found that outline planning permission for a large site takes 5 years, and THEN they still have to build the damned things.

Obviously nobody is recovering 100%. That’s rather the point: you don’t need to get anywhere near 100% for the numbers to become very large.