Why do perfectly good buildings stay empty

I didn't set out to write about governance.

I set out to understand why perfectly good buildings remain empty.

For most of my career I worked in construction. I saw empty buildings every day, the way anyone in the industry does. Some had stood vacant for years. Some had fallen into such poor condition that bringing them back felt almost impossible. Every one had a story behind it, and every one meant something lost, a home, a business, an investment, eventually a piece of a community.

So, I started asking why.

At first the answers came easily. Planning. Finance. Skills. Listed building rules. Lending. Policy. I asked around, and people gave me real, honest answers, and every one of them held up.

But alongside those answers, a different set kept appearing too, quieter, and much harder to categorise.

Probate that dragged on for years while a house sat waiting for someone to decide what to do with it. Care homes that closed and never reopened as anything at all. Businesses that failed, not through any single dramatic event, just slowly, until one day the shutter came down and never went up again.

Behind almost every one of them was a genuinely harrowing story, if you took the time to ask. A shop that had been someone's whole working life. A building that had once given people somewhere to be every day, a reason to get up, a routine, a purpose.

Things that are almost impossible to put a number on. And once they're gone, they very rarely come back.

The small things went first. A good morning to a colleague you saw every day. That's not something you can measure, or fund, or fix with a policy paper. But it matters. And it's gone.

But none of it, on its own, explained the whole picture. I even had comments like "it's all paid for, why worry?" An apathy I struggle with. But it's real.

Over time I've ended up in conversation with all sorts of people because of it, local authorities, enforcement officers, empty homes specialists, insurers, lawyers, academics, construction managers, heritage experts. I didn't plan it that way. One conversation just led to another.

What struck me wasn't how much they disagreed. It was how often they were, without realising it, describing different pieces of exactly the same problem, just from where they happened to be standing.

A recent one stuck with me. I spent well over an hour with someone deeply involved in high street regeneration, planning reform, embodied carbon, lending, heritage buildings, the future of our town centres. We hadn't set out to agree on anything. But almost everything he raised connected to something I'd already been turning over myself. Not because either of us had taken it from the other. Because if you spend long enough looking at the same system, you start noticing the same shapes in it, wherever you happen to come in from.

A week earlier, I'd had a strikingly similar conversation with someone else entirely. Different person, different route in, oddly, the same root underneath.

For a while I'd been sensing a shift. Those two conversations, in the space of a week, confirmed it.

I realised I hadn't really been studying empty buildings at all.

I'd been studying what happens between things. Between one person's decision and the next person's inheriting of it. Between what was known and what got written down. Between a job finishing and someone, later, actually being able to trust what was done.

It wasn't simply the gap between someone leaving and the light going off. An empty building on its own isn't necessarily the problem, most come back onto the market normally enough, no fuss, no drift. This was something else. The gap in between. The one nobody owns, nobody watches, and nobody carries forward. I've come to call it the custodial gap.

Because a building doesn't usually fail all at once. It drifts. Someone who knew the details moves on. A decision quietly becomes an assumption. A record goes missing, or was never quite complete. The next person starts again from nothing, because they don't trust what they've inherited, or there's nothing there to trust.

Eventually, not knowing costs more than doing nothing at all.

From outside, that just looks like another empty building. From inside it, it's something else, it's certainty, slowly leaking out of a system that used to hold it.

That thinking didn't stay abstract for long. It started turning into practical ideas, the kind that don't need a single new law to work, because I was deliberate about that from the start, non-political, non-critical, built to work inside the system we already have, not around it.

The first shape it took came from my own world, repairs. I'd spent years watching jobs pass from one person to the next, one department to another, and watching the record of what had actually happened thin out a little more at every handover. I kept thinking, whoever picks this up next needs to know what happened and who did it. Not a guess. Something defensible, something that survives the transfer. That was the first rough shape of it.

One thing that has always bothered me is the decay, the slow dilapidation, especially of our heritage buildings, churches, the more complex ones. I started to think, how can this be stopped at scale? Can it even be stopped? And who was I to try? I'm just a person. I have no formal training, no letters after my name. Why should anyone care what I have to say?

Regardless, I started thinking about my forty years in the built environment, what I'd seen, and how I'd seen it.

Looking back, some of what people now associate with my work wasn't a conclusion I reached later. It was there almost from the start, because it seemed impossible to separate from the problem itself.

If we were serious about bringing empty buildings back into use, why wasn't there a National Register, so we knew what we actually had? Why wasn't there a recognised National Standard, so the country was working toward one outcome instead of a hundred different interpretations? Why wasn't there an educational pathway linking further and higher education to the real demands of restoration, retrofit and long-term stewardship? And why didn't a building carry its own repair history with it, instead of that knowledge disappearing every time ownership changed hands?

Those questions weren't borrowed from anyone else's work, and they weren't answers to later conversations. They were where I started, because to me they were all the same question, asked from different angles.

What started as editorials slowly became something else entirely. If I was going to do this, I decided, I was going to do it properly. It would stand or fall on its own merit. So I set myself strict rules. Stay non-political. Stay non-critical. Every solution researched. Every claim substantiated. Write in plain English. Respect the people already trying to solve these problems, even where I disagreed with the way they approached them. Above everything else, whatever I proposed had to work within the legislation we already had. I wasn't interested in writing ideas that might become possible in ten years' time. I wanted things that could begin tomorrow morning.

The foundations didn't move. What changed, conversation by conversation, was my sense of how far they reached.

Repairs governance was never a new idea bolted on afterwards. I'd known early on that a defensible repair record needed to sit alongside the register and the standard, not instead of them. I simply held it back, deliberately, until the core framework had a floor solid enough to build on. As the conversations kept coming, lawyers, insurers, construction managers, universities, local authorities, each describing a piece of the same landscape from where they stood, it became clear that floor was ready sooner than I'd planned for.

So that's what changed. Not the idea. The timing.

Some of what's come from this has genuinely surprised me, more than I could list here. One moment stands out. I was invited to guest speak at an industry task force, fire protection, of all things, by someone I'd got to know through construction management circles. It meant a day at a national institution's headquarters, in a room full of people who knew far more about their corner of it than I did, all of it because I happened to care about empty buildings. I wouldn't have predicted that a decade ago.

I still care exactly as much about getting buildings back into use as I did when I started, probably more. But I stopped seeing it as only a housing problem, or a planning problem, or a money problem. Increasingly it looks like a symptom of something underneath all of it.

Somewhere in that, without ever meaning to, I gave the idea a name of my own: The Home Blueprint National Framework.

I still don't think of myself as someone who set out to write about governance.

I think of myself as someone who kept asking why and followed it further than I expected to.