§ Mr. Freesonasked the Secretary of State for the Environment if he will publish in the Official Report the reply of 17 September by his Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State to the right hon. Member for Brent East concerning empty Ministry of Defence houses.
§ Sir George YoungYes, the text of my letter is as follows:—
EMPTY HOUSES
You sent Ian Gow a copy of your letter of 30 August to Michael Heseltine about empty MOD housing. Most of the points you raise are for MOD to answer but I thought I should reply as well.I am, of course extremely concerned to see that the number of empty Government houses is kept to a minimum. A certain degree of vacancy is necessary for operational flexibility but my officials, both in PSA and in DOE, are in very frequent contact with their counterparts in MOD (and in other Government Departments with a housing stock) to see that all reasonable steps are taken to put any surplus to an alternative use as quickly as possible. My predecessor here also had frequent exchanges with Ministerial colleagues, both in the Ministry of Defence and other Departments with housing stocks, on this very point.One recent improvement which we have persuaded MOD to introduce is to consider houses which are likely to be temporarily empty for 6 months or more to local authorities on lease. The previous minimum qualifying period was 18 months. Currently there are about 400 such houses let for various periods to several different local authorities. It is reasonable to expect that more temporarily empty MOD houses may well be offered to local authorities as a result of the recent change in the minimum qualifying period.Acting for MOD, PSA sold 346 MOD houses in the 4 months from the end of March to the end of July this year. In the 4 months 251W before that, PSA sold another 351 MOD houses. I can assure you that every effort is devoted to the disposal of surplus property and that a very high degree of priority is accorded to the sale of empty houses. In the last 3 years of so, over 200 surplus MOD houses have been sold to 8 different local authorities. In the same period, almost 4,000 surplus MOD houses have been sold altogether by PSA.I hope you will find these statistics encouraging. Selling surplus MOD houses or allowing local authorities to lease temporarily surplus MOD houses is a task which will continue for some time yet but it is one which is being accorded great priority.I am sending a copy of this letter to John Stanley at the Ministry of Defence.