The Empty Homes Agency is an

independent campaigning charity, which

Low Demand Update

exists to highlight the waste of empty
property in England and works with others
to devise and promote sustainable
solutions to bring empty property back
into use.

GREAT ARTICLE!!!!! EVENTS

Courtesy of The Sunday Times: • NHC - Customer Excellence confer-

Save our streets BY RICHARD GIRLING
Welcome to neighbourhood botch, in which
the Government wants to regenerate
communities by knocking down thousands
of perfectly good houses. But the residents
won't be going quietly
A black-and-yellow caterpillar struggles
across the top of a hot stone wall and
puckers its way down towards the shade.
Seed heads tick in the sun. Hardening
shadows pick out the fine architectural
detail of the sandstone cottages. Across
the valley, the landscape rises to a cow-
cropped ridge, beyond which the view is
shut by the gauzy shoulder of Pendle Hill.
The heavens smiled when they made east
Lancashire. It was up there, on Pendle Hill
in 1652, that George Fox is supposed to
have had the vision of God that inspired
Quakerism. What inflamed his passion was
hypocrisy — the gulf between what
Christians professed to believe, and the
way they behaved in practice.
Not much changes. It is not in the name of
God but in that of John Prescott that the
valley now lies in the way of a policy
juggernaut spilling fine words but fixed on
destruction.
The fine words are about "sustainable
communities". It is a phrase that even its
authors are hard pressed to define, though
it seems to involve house-price inflation
and access to jobs, schools, shops and
"leisure facilities". Where these are lacking,
so the theory goes, the community needs
to be "regenerated" or "renewed" — words
that, in the simple minds of ordinary folk
not schooled in the language of
government, are commonly taken to mean
restored or repaired. The reality could not
be more different.
ence - Blackpool - 12 & 13 October
• UNECE Social Housing Conference in
Vienna on 28th - 30th November
SUMMI T 2005
• ODPM - Delivering Sustainable
Communities
Summit - G-MEX Manchester
31 J anuary to 2 February 2005
J ohn will be speaking at:
WFHA Conference - workshop on Empty
Homes and Low Demand - October 7th & 8th at
Llandrindod Wells
CI H Housing Management Conference -
workshop on Marketing Low Demand - 19th &
20th October at York
CI EH Conference - talk on Communities and
Low Demand - 28th October in London
CI H Lettings & Homeless Conference -
workshop on Low Demand - 18th & 19th
November in Harrogate
CI H Southern Housing Management
Conference - workshop on Marketing Low De-
mand - 25th & 26th J anuary 2005
For more details please contact J ohn on
01226 390 093
New Additions to the Low Demand
Page:
OCT—2004
• Article of the Month— including
feature article. 30-09-04

To read more please go to our website: • John’s Events Diary — John

Earnshaw’s up and coming
Http://www.emptyhomes.com speaking events— All events are Northern Office:
listed above— links to all events The Empty Homes Agency
are on the Empty Homes PO Box 3609
Barnsley
Agency website. S75 1WW
Phone/Fax: 01226 390 093
Mobile: 07719 798 033