Why Calderdale leaders are recommending to spend £100,000 on an old disused house

Calderdale Council’s Cabinet approved use of compulsory purchase powers to buy the building at King Cross Road, Halifax, after numerous attempts at working with the property’s over a number of years have failed to get it back into use.

The building, which will also need planning permission to change its use from that of part home and part doctor’s surgery to purely residential, has not been lived in since around 1990 and its poor condition is attracting anti-social behaviour, councillors were told in a briefing report.

Cabinet member for Regeneration and Resources Coun Jane Scullion (Lab, Luddenden Foot) said it had been a long saga.

The council preferred to use a “support and persuasion” policy to help owners of such properties to get them back into use but attempts had been tried and failed in this case, she said.

Anyone who looked down from the top of a bus passing it could see it as in a “desperate” condition, said Coun Scullion.

Concillors at full council will now be asked to put £100,000 into the authority’s capital programme to buy the building – this would be financed by the sale of the property, with any short or longer term funding needed being prudentially borrowed at a possible cost of around £7,000 a year.

Between October 2017 and October this year the council brought back 130 empty homes back into use, councillors learned.