Temporary accommodation crisis – Hastings

Hastings council has warned that the spiralling cost of temporary accommodation has placed it at risk of issuing a section 114 notice, which is a declaration that it will not be able to balance its budget. Temporary housing costs increased from £730,000 in 2019 to £4.5m in 2023. That now accounts for a quarter of the council’s annual revenue budget alone. Hastings has nearly 500 people living in temporary accommodation.

House prices in the town have gone up by more than many other areas, which has a knock-on effect on the overall supply of housing and pushes up rent. Hastings also has a higher than average proportion of people who receive local housing allowance (LHA) to help pay their rent.

Chris Hancock, head of housing, told Local Government Chronicle that people have been unable to afford the rents because of the “sheer gap” between the LHS and rents.

“We looked at those figures for properties that were advertised for private rent. Not only do they not meet local housing allowance, the very large majority of them, over 90%, are more than an £80 a month shortfall from the local housing allowances. That’s the big underlying issue. People have just been unable to afford the rental increases.”

High rents also make it almost impossible for young people looking to move into their first home so they end up seeking support from the council. The rise of Airbnb has also had a profound impact on the coastal town, with hundreds of short-term lets listed in the last month alone.

Hastings has created a home-visiting team and is trying to have conversations before people reach the point where temporary housing is the only option.

“As soon as somebody makes contact with us, especially if they’re being asked to leave the family home, we can go out and have that conversation at home, with mum and dad, with the family, talk through the realities of temporary accommodation, talk through what other options would be available,” Mr Hancock says.

This approach is “paying dividends” because it changes the type of conversation the council can have with people.

At the moment around 90% of the temporary accommodation is nightly lets, with 10% owned and managed by the council.

In Hastings this means that while the rental market is now “infinitely different” to how it was in 2016, the support people receive has hardly changed. This year just a handful of properties fell within the local housing allowance levels.

The bigest problem is that the rate for temporary accommodation in the private sector which councils get is the 2011 rate.

“Every time we spend £350 per week on a nightly let temporary accommodation, we’re only seeing about £90 of that back in support from central government and then we’re having to make up the difference,” Mr Hancock says.

But when a council uses its own stock for temporary accommodation, “as long as the rent is considered reasonable, we would have the full subsidy back from DWP to do that”.

Hastings has no council housing. As at September 2023 it had 1,557 households on its waiting list. In 2021/22 just 223 households from the waiting list were given tenancies by housing associations.