Owners of over 2,000 empty and derelict homes may be pressured to fill them under a new push by local leaders.

Council chiefs are trying to use more enforcement powers to target the worst problem homes, “nudging” landlords to sort out homes, sometimes even forcing sales, and clawing back £5.5m in unpaid council tax, while working with housing associations to buy and refurbish others.

They say the situation is most complicated when some people may not even realise they own homes, or try to hide it.

Regeneration director Richard Horniman said he believed the problem had escalated in recent years, with some homes left dangerous, insecure and plagued by anti-social behaviour.

He told a Middlesbrough Council meeting: “We’ve got 2,231 empty properties. That’s quite a startling statistic but it doesn’t mean they’re all sat empty and derelict.

“There’s 1,233 which have been empty for more than six months. There’s an outstanding council tax bill of £5.5m,” he said at a place select committee meeting.

“It would be great if we were allowed to just collect that. That’s nigh on impossible because you’ve got absent landlords, you’ve got loads of ways of people getting around the rules.”

Chasing those millions in council tax debt has led to a “combined push” to tackle empty properties, from reminding landlords of their responsibilities to compulsory purchases and taking them to court, councillors heard.

“A lot of the time (with) some of these properties, people will own them who don’t even know they own them,” Mr Horniman said, referring to an example: “Somebody who lives in Australia who have been left it in a will.

“They’re actually more frequent than you’d think. But they’re the ones that have the big impact because absolutely nobody is ever checking on the property.

“So they get the door forced open, they get people in there, they get all sorts of anti-social behaviour occurring there. But there’s nobody to contact about anything. It then falls to us to board it up.”

She said private investigators had previously been engaged in Gresham “to track people down who either didn’t know they owned a property or didn’t want anybody else to know”.

He added: “Some of them were never found. It seems bizarre but it was actually quite common.”

He said such cases took the longest time, and meant they could not get money back for work to homes: “It’s where you can’t find a landlord, or somebody’s deliberately not being found, that’s when it stretches to 12 months plus.

“We need to tackle the blight it puts on communities and certain areas. The more empty homes we bring back into use to provide homes for people, obviously the better all round.”

He said teams had pulled together and explored services, powers and investigation “to try and put a bit of pressure on, collectively to try and do something about it, because what we don’t have is the resources to just go and buy them all up,” said Mr Horniman.

“Quite often there isn’t a very easy solution. It’s about a number of agencies or departments all applying pressure to make the owner do something.”

He said they had done in-depth pilot work in North Ormesby: “We have taken a few pro-active steps, introduced completion notices where we’re forcing owners to undertake work.”

He told how environmental issues with empty homes could be pursued through the courts: “There are some properties where we’ve forced a sale.

“It might be to get the council tax paid, what we’d have to press them on is an environmental health issue, so we do that in a coordinated way by looking at which ones are collectively causing the biggest problems.

“We’re trying to tackle the worst ones wherever they are,” he told councillors.

He said they were working with housing associations, using money including government funding to buy, refurbish and manage empty homes which could be used for vulnerable people, saving money on temporary accommodation. One housing provider was about to get money to tackle 200 properties over the next two years.

Mr Horniman said: “There’s plenty starting to happen on the enforcement side and pushing people to do it, and we’re about to scale up the good work that’s been done on picking individual properties we can start to get into the hands of a more responsible housing provider. We’re just in its infancy at the minute.

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“If we target our interventions correctly it’s in their interests to do something with their properties because the area’s uplifting and they will be able to let them out.”

Referring to streets in Gresham, he said: “We’re working with our housing partner to look at who owns what in that area, which houses we believe we could get control over. We want to try and build a critical mass in small pockets and grow that out.”

He said it took years and hundreds of thousands of pounds to acquire empty properties themselves: “It’s a last resort but it exists and it has been done. The cheaper and easier solution is for the current owner to do something with it themselves because it’s in their interests to get it let.”