According to the Government’s Communities and Local Government office, there are 13,720 empty and boarded-up homes in Bradford.

Across West Yorkshire the number is reportedly 47,477. The Secretary of State in charge of this department is former Bradford Council Conservative leader Eric Pickles MP.

The current number of what Bradford Council says are problem properties – empty for six months or longer – is 3,445.

But there are also 10,313 homes which have been empty for less than six months, in a state of transitional ownership – someone has died and the property has been put up for sale.

Last July, when the Telegraph & Argus last highlighted long-term empty homes in Bradford, the figure was 3,800. So it looks as though there has been an improvement rather than a worsening.

Perhaps that explains the note of resigned irony among Bradford housing officials about the Government figure. While the 13,720 is not wrong, it does not tell the whole story, said Jez Lester, assistant chief executive (asset management) of social housing landlord Incommunities, which owns and manages more than 22,000 homes.

He says: “The figure issued by the Communities and Local Government office doesn’t differentiate between long and short-term vacancies and the different qualities and types of accommodation.

“What we are finding increasingly is that bedsits for the elderly are unpopular and are not being taken up. It shows that the elderly and their families don’t want to move into this kind of accommodation.

“We also have an over-supply of one-bed flats. Forty per cent of our stock is one-bed flats. They aren’t being taken up and are obsolete to requirements.

“Some of these empty homes will come into the Pickles figure of 13,720. But this figure gives the impression that they are all available for letting, but they are not.

“We have 18,600 people registered on our homes system who want to move into family houses. People’s aspirations are moving from flats to houses. Nobody wants one-bed flats anymore.

“We are in desperate need of two, three, four-bed family houses with affordable rents.”

Bradford Council already has a housing regeneration unit in Jacob’s Well, set up with a £3m budget to deal with the problem of empty and vandalised properties. Council leader Councillor Ian Greenwood said plenty of good things were being done, but the problem of long-term empty houses was complicated.

He says: “There are people leaving stuff derelict because they can’t be bothered. It’s not simply that money is short. Some of the worst cases are mental health problems.

“One property in my ward was derelict for 15 years because of this. That was one of the first ones the housing strategy unit did. It’s now back in proper occupation.

“Eric Pickles has made the job more difficult by making us wait two years instead of one before we can purchase such homes.”

Almost 20 years ago, the T&A ran a series of in-depth news and feature articles about what council housing officials then were calling a crisis.

On the back of Margaret Thatcher’s policy of selling-off council houses, people such as housing director Jack Feather were concerned that too few houses were being built or maintained to serve the metropolitan district’s growing population.

The population is now about 500,000, but there is still a shortage of housing appropriate to the needs of people. The 3,445 long-term empty properties is just part of the problem, not the whole of it.

So is there any positive news to report?

Bradford Council starts building houses on two sites this year, with funding from the Homes and Communities agency.

In the past two years, Incommunities, which borrows money from Nationwide and Barclays, has built 278 houses and is on site with another 40 which will be for rent. In addition, it is building 52 houses for shared ownership, where the resident buys a percentage of the equity and pays rent on the remainder of the property’s value.

Mr Lester says: “Access to mortgages is still a problem, so part-buy, part-rent shared ownership is popular – depending on location. It wouldn’t necessarily work in areas where the market is depressed.”

Over the past eight years of its existence, Incommunities has spent £300m on upgrading its housing stock, installing 12,000 new bathrooms, 12,000 new kitchens and 15,000 new central heating systems, he adds.