Spike in homelessness sees Council spend £1m housing families in Travelodges

A local authority has spent more than £1m housing homeless families in Travelodge hotel rooms.

Peterborough City Council confirmed it had run out of hostel beds and B&B rooms to house people after a spike in the number of families presenting as homeless.

The authority’s responsible service director, Adrian Chapman, blamed the trend partly on the Government’s Universal Credit scheme which sees housing benefit paid to tenants instead of directly to landlords.

An average of 60 to 90 people per month presented themselves as homeless in 2012 and this rose to 150 in August 2016, the authority said.

It costs between £294 to £588 per week to house people in one of Peterborough’s three Travelodge hotels.

The council has forecast a £1.8m overspend this financial year, and £1.2m of that was down to the cost of supporting people in temporary accommodation.

A report to the authority’s cabinet states: “One of the council’s key pressures is a rise in the number of families presenting as homeless and requiring support.”

The authority said that an average of 28 homeless families were staying at Travelodge hotels but this had been as high a 40.

The average length of stay was 20 days.

Mr Chapman said, in a briefing to The Peterborough Telegraph, that the authority was soon to agree a deal to secure 74 more properties to ease housing pressure.

Crisis, the national charity for single homeless people, said all forms of homelessness have risen nationally after years of declining trends.

This is due to a shortage of housing, ongoing effects of the economic recession and reforms and cuts to housing benefit, the charity said.

Local authorities have a duty to house some homeless people who meet a strict set of criteria.

A total of 57,750 households were accepted as homeless nationally in 2015/16, which is an increase of 6% on 2014/15, Crisis said.

The majority of single people who approach their local authority will not be eligible for housing.

In 2015, Government street counts estimated that around 3,569 people sleep rough on any one night across England, a rise of 30% on the previous year and double the amount since 2010.

Roger Harding, director of communications, policy and campaigns at Shelter, said: “With welfare cuts and our chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes continuing to take their toll, it’s little wonder that so many families are tragically losing their home and turning to their local council desperate for help.

“Every day we hear from homeless families living in emergency B&Bs, hotels or hostels – often for weeks on end – as overburdened councils struggle to find them anywhere suitable to live. But councils are stuck between a rock and a hard place, battling with stripped back budgets, an overwhelming number of homeless families and a drastic shortage of homes.

“The new Government has an opportunity to address the root cause of this crisis by building homes that people on lower incomes can actually afford to live in. Until they do, it’s essential that councils receive proper funding to help support homeless families in their area.”

Mr Chapman added: “Historically Peterborough has managed the situation really well and been seen to buck lots of national trends.

“We stopped people becoming homeless in the first place.

“What’s interesting this time is we can look to April and see a massive spike [in people presenting as homeless].

“Up to that point we were really constant and managing really well.”

He said hostels had been nearly full and the authority had some people in B&Bs, but then the situation intensified.

“It’s two or three things that have converged,” he said. “Some landlords in the city are just deciding to sell up, there’s not enough profit in the business.

“The welfare reforms are starting to bite, people can’t afford to stay in oversize property, and some landlords are not taking housing benefit claimants.

“It’s a perfect storm.”

He said around half of the homeless people accommodated in Travelodge hotels in Peterborough were single households, and the other half were couples and families, some with young children.

He said it was “disruptive” and “not socially right” to have to accommodate people in hotel rooms, but they were used until more sustainable accommodation could be found.

The alternative to local budget hotel rooms was accommodation out of the area, Mr Chapman said.

He said other local authorities nationally had experienced a spike in figures around April.

The council was in dialogue with London boroughs where homelessness had been a particular problem and was looking at quick-build prefabricated accommodation as used in Bristol.

“At least people have got their own front door then,” said Mr Chapman.

He continued: “Our attempts are just to find some really quick-fix solutions. They may not be ideal but they’ve got to be better than putting them in a hotel chain.

“It would appear to be a problem that certainly we’re seeing in some other local authority areas.”

A Government spokesman said: “There are many reasons for homelessness and to suggest that it is due to welfare reforms is wholly misleading.

“Councils have a responsibility to house families in settled accommodation as quickly as possible, which is why we have given them the tools to achieve this.

“One person without a home is one too many and we are investing over £500 million to tackle homelessness and stop it happening in the first place.”

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