EFFORTS to slash the number of homes standing empty for months or even years are making progress, Council bosses say.

There are currently 4,130 homes across the district which have been empty for six months or more, including 206 which have been unoccupied for more than a decade.

The overall number has been slashed by more than 3,000 in eight years, but just as thousands of homes are brought back into use each year, more fall empty.

Deputy Council leader Councillor Val Slater said: “I always refer to the job we do on empty homes a little bit like painting the Forth Road Bridge. It’s that churn and turnover, so we will never get to the end.”

Bradford Council uses a variety of methods to get houses back into use, including acting as an introduction service between owners and developers looking for a renovation project, or offering legal assistance where ownership of a house is unclear.

Owners of empty properties also have to pay extra council tax, currently 150 per cent of the bill.

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Extra effort is made to sort out properties seen to be high-risk, such as those attracting vandals or falling into severe disrepair. There are currently 100 homes in this category across the district.

Occasionally, they forcibly buy the house from the owner using compulsory purchase powers, a report by strategic director of place Steve Hartley says.

Since 2010, 18 houses have been forcibly bought in this way, with a further 11 in the pipeline.

But Councillor Martin Smith, the opposition Conservative group’s spokesman on housing, said the progress being made was too slow and claimed the backlog could be cleared in two years with a bit of focus, helping to ease the pressure on greenfield housing sites.

He said the number of homes being compulsory-purchased by the Council was derisory and amounted to around two a year.

He said: “As a Council, we need to get more aggressive on compulsory purchase.”