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[% INCLUDE 'header.html', title => loc('Frequently Asked Questions') %]
<h1>Frequently Asked Questions</h1>
<dl>
<dt>What is this site for?</dt>
<dd>This site is to help make it as easy as possible for you to get
empty homes in your area put back into use. It allows you, to view empty homes
that have been reported and see what has been done about them. It makes
councils accountable for responding and dealing with the empty homes you
report.</dd>
<dt>How do I use the site?</dt>
<dd>Enter a postcode or address in the box on the homepage and you
are presented with a map of that area. Click where the empty property is, fill
in the details, upload a photo if you have one and press submit. That’s
it. You can also view other empty properties that have been reported and see
what has been done about them.</dd>
<dt>Is it free?</dt>
<dd>Yes. The costs of developing and running this site are shared
between the Empty Homes Agency and Shelter Cymru through the generosity of
their funders. Both the Empty Homes Agency and Shelter Cymru are registered charities,
so if you believe in their aims and would like to make a contribution, please do:
<a href="http://www.emptyhomes.com/donate.html">Empty Homes Agency</a>
or <a href="http://www.sheltercymru.org.uk/shelter/howtohelp/ood.asp">Shelter Cymru</a>.</dd>
<dt>Do you remove silly or illegal content?</dt>
<dd>We reserve the right to remove any reports or updates
which we consider to be inappropriate.</dd>
<dt>How do councils bring empty properties back into use?</dt>
<dd><p>All councils in England and Wales have powers to bring empty
homes back into use. Many are very good at it, some are not. Most councils seek
to persuade and help the owner to bring their property back into use; they only
use legal powers such as Empty Dwelling Management Orders when help and
persuasion have failed.</p> <p>
Most empty homes are brought back into use eventually by their owner. But in
many cases this takes years. Empty homes often decline fast – they become
overrun with weeds and attacked by the weather. They are often used by
squatters, fly tippers, vandals and are sometimes subject to arson. The whole
neighbourhood suffers waiting for the owner to deal with their property.</p> <p>
Councils help and persuade owners to bring their properties into use faster.
Even so the process can be slow, especially if the property is in very poor
repair or the owner is unwilling to do anything. In most cases it takes six
months before you can expect to see anything change, occasionally longer. This
doesn’t mean the council isn’t doing anything, which is why we encourage
councils to update the website so you can see what is happening.</p> <p>
We will contact you twice (a month and six months after you report the empty
home) so you can tell us what has happened. If the council doesn’t do anything,
or you think their response is inadequate we will advise you what you can do
next.</p> <p>
If the empty home is owned by the government or one its agencies, councils are
often powerless to help. However you might be able to take action directly
yourself using a PROD:
<a href="http://www.emptyhomes.com/usefulinformation/policy_docs/prods.html">http://www.emptyhomes.com/usefulinformation/policy_docs/prods.html</a>
</dd>
<dt>Will reporting an empty home make any difference?</dt>
<dd><p>Yes. Councils can make a real difference, but they have lots of
things to do. Many councils only deal with empty homes that are reported to
them. If people do not report empty homes, councils may well conclude that
other areas of work are more important.</p> <p>
There are over 840,000 empty homes in the UK. The Empty Homes Agency estimates
that over half of these are unnecessarily empty. The effect of this is to
significantly reduce the available housing stock fuelling the UK’s housing
crisis. A by-product of this waste is that far greater pressure is put on
building land as more homes are built to meet the shortfall. The Empty Homes
Agency estimate that bringing just a quarter of the UK’s empty homes into use
would provide homes for 700,000 people, save 160 square kilometres of land and
save 10 million tonnes of CO<sub>2</sub> over building the same number of new homes.
</dt>
</dl>
<h2>Privacy Questions</h2>
<dl>
<dt>Who gets to see my email address?</dt>
<dd>If you submit an empty property, your details are provided to us and to the council.
Your name is displayed upon the site if you let us, but not your email address;
similarly with updates. We will never give or sell your email address to
anyone else, unless we are obliged to by law.</dd>
<dt>Will you send nasty, brutish spam to my email address?</dt>
<dd>Never. We will email you if someone leaves an update on a
report you’ve made, and send you questionnaire emails four weeks and six months
after you submit a problem, asking for a status update; we’ll only ever
send you emails in relation to your problem.</dd>
</dl>
<h2>Organisation Questions</h2>
<dl>
<dt>Who built this site?</dt>
<dd>This site was built by <a href="http://www.mysociety.org/">mySociety</a>.
mySociety is the project of a registered charity which has grown out of the community of
volunteers who built sites like <a href="http://www.theyworkforyou.com/">TheyWorkForYou</a>.
mySociety’s primary mission is to build Internet projects which give people simple, tangible
benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. Our first project
was <a href="http://www.writetothem.com/">WriteToThem</a>, where you can write to any of your
elected representatives, for free.
<a href="https://secure.mysociety.org/donate/">Donate to mySociety</a></dd>
<dt>Where’s the "source code" to this site?</dt>
<dd>The software behind this site is open source, and available
to you mainly under the GNU Affero GPL software license. You can <a
href="http://github.com/mysociety/fixmystreet">download the
source code</a> and help us develop it.
You’re welcome to use it in your own projects, although you must also
make available the source code to any such projects.</dd>
<dt>People build things, not organisations. Who <em>actually</em> built it?</dt>
<dd>This adaptation of <a href="http://www.fixmystreet.com/">Fix­MyStreet</a>
was written by Matthew Somerville. Thanks go to
<a href="http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk">Ordnance Survey</a> (for the maps,
UK postcodes, and UK addresses – data © Crown copyright, all
rights reserved, Ministry of Justice 100037819 2008),
Yahoo! for their BSD-licensed JavaScript libraries, the entire free software
community (this particular project was brought to you by Perl, PostgreSQL,
and the number 161.290) and <a
href="http://www.m247.com/">M247</a> (who kindly host all
our servers).
Let us know if we’ve missed anyone.</dd>
</dl>
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