cheltenham council sorting empty houses

[russman777]

http://m.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/story.html?ai... here is the link.
I put this up as there's a paragraph where its says.

Boosting the workforce will help free up time to enable experienced professionals to tackle the longest term and most problematic vacant properties, especially in cases where owners cannot be traced, refuse to bring their properties back into use or say no to selling up. 

In such cases the council will threaten landlords with enforced sale or compulsory purchase orders to force their hand.

If someone owned a property and wanted to leave it alone,then how can they make them sell it because they want to put some lout in there instead.

[rowey200]

There is legislation available to Local Authorities to enable them to compulsory purchase empty properties that have a history of being long-term empty and normally also a general nuisance to the local community - it's politically very high on the agenda at the moment due to the large amount of long term empty properties (10 yrs +) and the high housing need.

It's worth noting that the normal procedure is for the Local Authority to sell the property on to another private owner that will use the property as intended rather that keep hold of it and house tenants themselves.