ST HELENS councillors have called for an urgent meeting to consider the implications of the rising number of council properties becoming empty and how to deal with them.

The cost of repairing the empty property is eating away at the council's repairs budget. More than half the £10 million budget could be spent on vacant property repairs by the end of the year.

Council leader Marie Rimmer told the Housing and Environmental Services Committee: "This is not a problem of our creation. Housing associations are attracting tenants because they can build new property and have the money to modernise. This discourages people away from local authority housing, which has been starved of investment for many years.

"But we cannot turn our back on this problem and we must ensure that the money we are spending on empty property is not being wasted."

The authority is not alone in facing the problem of falling demand for council housing with 15 per cent of its property classed as difficult to let compared with a Merseyside average of 22 per cent.

The council has already taken action to adjust its allocations policy and as a result some of its empty properties have been occupied and a series of improvements to the service are in the pipeline.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.