Buy your home for a £1 and be given 30k loan to do it up. Sounds an excellent idea to me. It houses people, gives them their own home and will bring the streets back to life.
There is nothing worse than boarded up housing that tends to end up attracting all sorts of worthless scum(Druggies etc) so anything to combat this wins my vote.
And are councils letting out properties at less than the market rate? They may be, if only because their tenants don't have quite the same protection afforded to others. And they are still maintaining the properties? If that's at less than current rates that's very nice of them but since few retain loads of direct labour, I rather doubt it.
Unfortunately, in many towns where there used to be lots of run-down properties, the reason they were run-down was that the occupants couldn't get jobs, and left for more prosperous areas. We have to hope that in these places, there just aren't far more empty houses than jobs for the residents.