Landlords could be forced to bring abandoned properties back into use or rent them to the homeless.

There are more than 600 empty homes in Bognor, Littlehampton, Arundel and the surrounding villages in the Arun district.

Arun District Council is to hire a part-time empty homes officer who will persuade their owners to rent them out or put them into a scheme where they will be repaired and rented to homeless people.

Landlords will only be forced to rent their homes to the homeless if they refuse to put them back into use and it will take about 18 months to go through the process of forcing a person to enter their property into the scheme.

Roger Wood, deputy head of Environmental Health, said: "The vast majority of properties empty for six months or more are in the private sector, I would say more than 99 per cent of them."

He said bringing abandoned properties back into use would help to slow down the overheated housing market and reduce the pressure to build new homes.

Miranda Litchfield, deputy chief executive of the Chichester Christian Care Association, helps run a night shelter in Bognor and said the town had a significant problem with homelessness.

She said: "We had 240 people who used our shelters in the Arun district last year, 60 per cent of them were homeless and there are others out there who do not use the shelters.

"Part of the problem is that homelessness is seen as only being an urban problem."

She said people were often sent to centres where they were helped to put their lives back together but found there were no landlords willing to rent to people on housing benefit when they left.