A SHORTAGE of building workers is preventing flood victims from returning to their homes more than six months after July's devastating floods.

Residents in Earl Street and Duke Street, off Botley Road, Oxford, say they are living in a "ghost town" as residents struggle to find workmen to renovate their damaged homes.

Of the 36 homes in Earl Street, only 11 are occupied again, and some residents are being forced to get workmen from hundreds of miles away to complete the work.

Nick Hills, 59, who is living upstairs in his Earl Street home while he waits for a builder to start, said: "It's a ghost town. There's a lot of work still to be done in Earl Street.

"Inevitably, workmen are hard to come across because there is so much work for them to do.

"Any worker who's worth his salt is already taken."

Mr Hills, who has no floor downstairs and has been waiting for a workman to start for seven weeks, added: "Only a handful of people have managed to move back.

"People see cars running up and down Botley Road again and think normality appears to have returned, but you have only got to look down the street and you can see that problems from July still exist."

Earl Street resident Ginny Black, 32, who has managed to move home, said: "A lot of the workmen are busy and people can't return to their homes because they aren't ready.

"I know a fair few people are in that position.

"There's a shortage of qualified workmen and the good workmen are doing every job in its turn."

Chris Harris, a carpenter from Hailey, near Witney, working in Duke Street, said: "Local workmen have been inundated with jobs working on flooded properties.

"I have been in the street for around a month so far on and off and there are some homes that have not even been started yet.

"It's a case of trying to fit them all in."

Mr Harris said he still had another flooded property to work on in Duke Street and two flood-damaged properties in Witney.

One Earl Street landlord who was told he would face a long wait for a local plasterer for his property instead hired a contractor from far-off Berwick-upon-Tweed, in Northumberland, to come down and do the work.

Gary Beasley, 43, who travelled 320 miles from England's most northernly town, said: "The insurance company did not have any local builders who could get here before December, so the owner negotiated with the insurance company to get me in.

"The house had to be gutted from the bottom and my client could not wait. Everyone was in the same boat with all the flooding in this area.

"When I first came down in October there were three homes occupied in the street, but it's starting to fill up again very slowly."