Hotels rake in almost £10million housing homeless for three councils

HOTEL bosses have raked in a “shocking” £10million of taxpayers’ money by housing the homeless for just three councils.

The key authorities dotted across the country are using hotels and B&Bs to house homeless people.

Figures obtained by The Sun show three councils across England have forked out £9.7million in two years in a desperate bid to tackle the crisis.

London’s Westminster Council paid £4.3million in two years to house homeless people in hotels, spending £2.47million up until 2016 before spending £1.84million through to April 2017.

Manchester City Council paid even more at £4.6million, while Windsor and Maidenhead – in Prime Minister Theresa May’s constituency – spent £71,295 on putting homeless people up in B&Bs to April 2016 which jumped to a whopping £658,095 to April 2017, nine times as much.

Authorities in the borough were criticised for moving the homeless ahead of last month’s royal wedding when police confiscated rough sleepers’ belongings to move them on and impounded a bus offering refuge for the homeless before the event.

Labour mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham launched a city homeless fund last year which has so far raised £110,000, but between April 2015 and April 2016 the council splurged £1.66million on hotels for the homeless while this figure almost doubled to £3.01million to April 2017.

The actual figure for the whole of the country could be much higher as several councils failed to respond including Birmingham City Council.

Others such as Leeds and Newcastle did not spend any cash on hotels to house homeless people while Sheffield spent less than £30,000.

Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, said: “These shocking numbers reveal the pain inflicted by the housing emergency in this country.

“Thousands of desperate families have to turn to their council for help after being pushed into homelessness by expensive private rents, welfare cuts and the drought of affordable homes.

“Every day at Shelter we speak to families forced to live in one room of a cramped emergency B&B or hostel, often for months on end.

“To stop more families becoming homeless in the first place, the government must make sure housing benefit covers the cost of rents in the short-term, while also tackling the root of the crisis by building a new generation of social homes to rent.”

In December a committee of MPs said homelessness in England was a “national crisis” and the government’s attitude was “unacceptably complacent”.

A Public Accounts Committee report found there were more than 9,000 rough sleepers and some 78,000 families living in temporary accommodation, leaving 120,000 children without permanent housing.

Since 2011, the number of people sleeping on the streets has increased by 134 per cent, the report says, and the number of people living in temporary accommodation has risen by about two-thirds.

Westminster, Windsor and Maidenhead and Manchester council said they were trying to buy and build more homes to bring down spending on hotels and bed and breakfasts.

Councillor Martin Tett of the Local Government Association said: “It is also essential that all councils are able to borrow to build new homes and government adapts welfare reforms to prevent homelessness from happening in the first place.”

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