It’s not news that the UK has a housing crisis. 280,000 people are without a home in the UK—a figure which is rising as a result of the pandemic—and the Conservative government has recently admitted to having no plans to meet their target of building 300,000 homes a year. Time after time, the private sector has proven itself incapable of building the right kind of homes to meet the country’s needs.

As a response, non-profit community-led housing groups and Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have started taking land and housing into community ownership. What they need to further their efforts is access to land and housing.

In an attempt to ‘unlock’ surplus public land and property and make it more accessible to buyers, last month housing secretary Robert Jenrick announced a new ‘Right to Regenerate’ plan, citing figures of over 25,000 vacant council-owned properties that could be brought back into use. All the buyer would have to do is submit their interest in a vacant plot of land or disused building, and the relevant public body or local council would be forced to sell it at market value if they have no valid reason to hold on to it.

On paper, this might sound good: a chance to beautify local eyesores, bring empty homes back into use, or extend the odd back garden. But as with all Tory policy, it warrants scrutiny. Alarm bells should first ring given that ‘regeneration’ is often a euphemism for gentrification.

Speaking to Tribune, Martin Newman from the housing charity Giroscope—which brings empty homes back into use as affordable housing in Hull—says that the policy should first and foremost be applied to the private sector. This is indeed the glaring shortcoming of the Right to Regenerate proposal: its disregard of privately owned properties. ‘Too many of the large derelict buildings in Hull are in private ownership,’ Newman adds, ‘usually belonging to people from outside the city.’

Chris Bailey, Campaign Manager at Action on Empty Homes, points out the extent of the national scale: ‘The [Right to Regenerate] press release drew attention to 25,000 supposedly vacant council properties,’ he tells Tribune. ‘If we applied that measure to all empties in England, there would be a whopping 666,000 currently vacant – the vast majority of which are privately owned.’

Public land, meanwhile, is already being disposed of at a high rate. Research by community organisation network Locality found that as many as 4,000 publicly owned buildings and spaces are being sold each year. To put this trend into perspective, economic geographer Brett Christophers revealed in his book The New Enclosure that over the past 40 years, some 10 percent of Britain’s landmass has been flogged by Whitehall to private buyers – land which would today amount to a value of around £400 billion.

As Christophers notes, ‘If the government disposes of public land, it disposes of the public power associated with it.’ As the Right to Regenerate ignores vacant private properties and focuses solely on the disposal of public land and property, Bailey warns that this policy could thus be ‘a rogue charter to force the sale of public land and assets.’

Instead, any policy along these lines must ensure that land ends up in the right hands – hands which will place social value at the heart of future use and development. ‘CLTs are good guardians of public land,’ explains Tom Chance, CEO of the National Community Land Trust Network, ‘since they are by definition required to use their assets to further the social, economic, and environmental wellbeing of their communities, in perpetuity.’

One potential positive of the Right to Regenerate is the ‘right of first refusal’ extended to the interested party, which the government claims is there to support community buyers. This element has been welcomed by many, including the National CLT Network, as it will give community groups more time to raise funds after submitting an initial interest in the property.

‘In areas with more expensive property markets, communities and Community Land Trusts can, of course, struggle to compete with for-profit entities for parcels of land at market rates,’ Chance tells Tribune. ‘That’s why we would like to see a right of first refusal specifically for Community Land Trusts and other properly constituted community and charitable organisations.’

As it stands, however, the policy broadly alludes to ‘individuals, businesses, and organisations’ as its beneficiaries, and is yet to clarify under what circumstances this ‘right of first refusal’ will be employed. Without explicitly centring community groups as those who will be entitled to exercise the ‘right of first refusal’, the policy opens the door for private property developers—who already have the cash, as well as a keen eye trained on the public land register—to swoop in and secure the purchase. ‘As with everything in this government’s housing policy, it’s those with the most money who control what happens,’ Bailey remarks.

Even if a community right of first refusal is granted, and even if private buildings were incorporated, achieving the market value asking-prices may remain a barrier for community groups. ‘There shouldn’t be a presumption that land is sold for ‘market value’,’ says Chance. Rather, he proposes that properties should be sold at a price that can be ‘reasonably attained’: a price which would account for the ‘social, economic, and environmental outcomes.’

And funding and grants from central government for community groups have dried up almost entirely in recent years. The government did announce £4 million in revenue funding for a new Community Housing Fund last month, but research by the National CLT Network shows that the demand in this sector will amount to £53 million over the coming five years. The 2019 Conservative manifesto also committed to an aspirational £150 million Community Ownership Fund, which has since failed to materialise.

‘Amendments are also needed to existing legislation,’ Locality add, ‘like changing the Community Right to Bid to create a genuine ‘Community Right to Own’, similar to that which exists in Scotland, and extending the time given to communities to raise funds to buy-out important community assets [against private competitors].’

Scotland’s 2003 Land Reform Act enshrines a ‘community right to buy’, which includes, crucially, a right of first refusal specifically for community groups. The success of Scotland’s community land ownership—with 560,000 acres now owned—has also largely been down to the £10 million Scottish Land Fund budget.

Ultimately, though, it’s local government bodies which should be able to provide the housing and facilities needed by their populations. ‘We want councils to have improved powers to take control of long-term unoccupied homes,’ Chris Bailey says. He proposes an enhanced version of the current Empty Dwelling Management Order (EDMO), in which councils would only have to prove lack of use to return a property to use; current EDMOs require councils to prove two years of no use, plus evidence of vandalism or ‘nuisance to the community’.

‘Even Grenfell’s Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Conservative leaders called for this obstacle to be removed, saying it was preventing them using its massive supply of empty homes to house those in acute housing need post-Grenfell,’ Bailey explains. ‘In Kensington and Chelsea one in every eight homes is either long-term empty or classed as an empty so-called second home.’

He puts it bluntly: ‘This [policy] is throwing a dead cat on the table to distract from the wider housing and economic crisis.’ Without meaningful financial and legislative support making it easier for communities to tap into empty private sector properties and giving community groups the support they need, tepid policies like the Right to Regenerate can do more harm than good.