Orkney Council to offer owners of empty homes £25,000 loan for repairs

Orkney Islands Council is planning to offer loans of up to £25,000 to owners of empty homes

Councillors in Orkney have agreed that £1m should be set aside so that loans of up to £25,000 can be offered to owners of empty houses.

The loans would be open to people who own a house that has been empty for more than one year.

The money would have to be used to bring an empty property up to the “statutory repairing standard”.

There would be a condition attached to the loan that the property should be made available to key workers in return for the loan being available.

Any loans would have to be paid back within five years.

The amount of money the council would loan will depend on the condition of the home.

Councillors on Orkney Islands Council’s monitoring and audit committee agreed the measures earlier this week.

They backed proposals stating £1m be set aside from the council’s strategic reserve fund to pay for the loans.

This has followed a report agreed by councillors on the education, leisure and housing committee back in June this year.

While the council will be hoping empty home owners make best use of the scheme, the local authority doesn’t know what the uptake will be.

As such, it will be reviewed regularly.

While councillors unanimously backed the money being set aside for the scheme, there were questions.

Councillor Owen Tierney asked what kind of repairs would be needed to meet the statutory repairing standard.

He said: “How onerous is this to achieve? Do you have to put in double glazing, modern insulation, air source heating and all that stuff?

“I can think of houses you can live in right now, but whether that meets this repairing standard…”

The council’s head of strategic housing, housing operations and homelessness, Frances Troup answered.

She said: “Basically, it’s about a good standard of accommodation.

“It needs to be wind and water-tight and have all the things you’d expect in a modern property.

“You’d expect it to be heated and reach an acceptable insulation standard.

“It doesn’t have to reach the same energy efficiency standard as social housing, but it would have to be a good standard.

“We’re happy to work with people and help them to know what would need to be done to their property.”

How bad is Orkney’s empty homes problem?

Statistics from the National Records of Scotland show that, as of 2024, Orkney has 747 “vacant dwellings.”

This amounts to 6.3% of the county’s total dwellings.

To put this in perspective, the Scottish rate in 2024 was 3.3%.

A Scottish Government Audit of Empty Homes showed that the most common reasons for homeowners across Scotland not bringing empty properties back into use were financial barriers, practical reasons, market factors and family attachment to the property.