Blaenau Gwent County Council’s Cabinet has agreed to undertake a consultation exercise to seek your views about charging a council tax premium for long‐term empty properties and second homes in the county.

The Housing waiting list across Blaenau Gwent is significant and the Council also experiences high levels of homelessness requiring costly short term emergency accommodation to be provided.

To help address these issues, the Council’s Empty Property Strategy aims to bring vacant properties back into use by considering all the options available for tackling the problem of empty properties, and to ensure that where vacant properties are identified every effort is made to renovate them to a good standard.

Under section 12A and 12B of the Local Government Finance Act 1992, with effect from the 1st April 2023 the Council has discretionary powers that allow premiums of up to 300% to be charged on these properties.

Depending on the outcome of the consultation exercise the Council may consider introducing premiums for these classes of properties in the future.

The consultation exercise will run until the 30th September 2023.

You can access the survey here