Annual Impact Report 2024

Meeting our strategic objectives – 5

Run the Scottish Empty Homes Advice Service

The Scottish Empty Homes Advice Service (SEHAS) provides support to anyone with a query related to an empty home, whether it be an empty home owner, a neighbour or a potential investor. This was a year of transition for us due to staffing changes, largely explaining the reduction in the number of contacts compared with previous years.

Both advisers left in the latter half of 2023 and were replaced in early 2024. In the interim period, a reduced advice service was run with the wider team covering the service. The decision to close the phone line was made to ensure there was capacity across the wider SEHP team to provide timely advice to empty home owners. Advice continued to be delivered via email with the time target increased to within 5 working days. Consequently, there was a large reduction in contacts between October-December 2023.

From January onwards the number of contacts quickly returned to pre-October levels, demonstrating the role the service plays for owners and neighbours. Although it was challenging, we were able to fully re-open the advice service by the end of January.

From January until the end of March our focus was narrow, with support provided by the wider team and a review of available digital resources left by previous advice service team members. Meetings with the wider EHO network were productive and informative, with the relationships established at this early stage proving important in dealing with subsequent advice enquiries.

This year we received 356 enquiries, this was 19.3% fewer than the previous year and nearly 100 contacts short of our target of 450. Owner related contacts therefore dropped from 70 to 54.

Number of owner related contacts 2019-2024

Owner related contacts still accounted for 15.6% of the total contacts, just 0.4% lower than the previous year, representing no significant change, but lower than our stretch target of 25%, which is set with the understanding that contacts with owners are where we can have the most impact in bringing empty homes back into use.

Contact Breakdown

Promotion of the Advice Service via SEHP website

Our review of the website revealed there was no separate Scottish Empty Homes Advice Service identity. There is now a dedicated SEHAS tab with clear sections for owners, neighbours and investors, tying in with our digital marketing.

Our neighbour guides are live on our website and have been a useful casework tool with all standard advice in one place to direct people to. This allows us to invest time in more complex cases. We’ve promoted these more widely to external organisations such as Under One Roof and Community Councils Scotland’s Improvement Service. This gives organisations tools to have conversations with people in the community impacted by empty homes as well as raising awareness of our service.

Social Media

This social media post in Q4 of 2023-2024 about a home brought back into use in the Western Isles had over 1000 impressions on Twitter, representing one of the more popular posts of the quarter.

This evidences the importance and value of human stories when trying to engage the public in empty homes work. The new advisers have begun a process of collecting more case study examples to showcase these stories and the variety of empty homes work taking place across Scotland.

Looking Forward

Now that the new advice team is settled in post, our work will widen in scope in 2024-2025 to include some larger objectives to support the wider strategy of the Scottish Empty Homes Partnership:

These include:

• A review of the current SEHP matchmaker service and how it relates to existing Local Authority matchmaker schemes. The review will look at how effective our current service is in supporting wider SEHP objectives and whether time spent on managing it could be better spent elsewhere to support these objectives. Consideration will be given as to whether SEHAS can effectively manage a national matchmaker scheme based on the successful schemes in Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire.
• To increase and improve our online advice offering, particularly for neighbours and investors, with a small number of owner related resources also being reviewed. Additional online resources will free up time for the advice team and enable more efficient use of influencing, persuasion and problem solving for more complex cases, particularly those of empty home owners.
• Launching a feedback survey to better understand and evidence the role SEHAS plays in supporting users with their empty homes issues, with particular emphasis on assessing how impactful SEHAS is at supporting owners.