Merlin Betts
This article is part of a series. Find the previous article here, and overview here.
Alright, so the biggest single problem for our budget is the local housing crisis and how blindingly expensive it is to run temporary accommodation.
Why do so many people need temporary accommodation? Hastings Borough Council’s chief housing officer, Chris Hancock, told the Local Government Chronicle, “We looked at those figures for properties that were advertised for private rent. Not only do they not meet local housing allowance [LHA/housing benefit], 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.” And nor can HBC. They only own and run about 10% of their temporary accommodation, the rest is ‘night-by-night’ rental running at about £350 a week according to Mr Hancock, and he says Westminster only pays £90 of that.
My rough calculations for 500 temporary homes puts the HBC cost at about £6,500,000 annually. That’s 87% of their council tax income for 2022-2023. My numbers are a bit rough here, but you get the point.
A bit of background to that. Most council housing stock was sold off years ago to the housing associations that became the terrifying, monolithic Southern Housing. Regulations are put in place to make it difficult for even very rich councils to develop in-house accommodation once again (not least of all, right to buy). But councils still have a statutory duty to provide temporary accommodation to those who need it. So, even if they can’t build, buy or own their own houses long-term, they are still legally required to provide. This means landlords renting to the council can charge above market value for badly maintained and ill-suited properties, and the council can do bugger all about it.
Bring it up to date with the seafront destinations of Hastings, Old Town and St Leonards becoming desirable homes and a viable spot for tourism, and even the landlords renting to the council start to transform into AirBnBs. Loophole accommodation (AirBnBs being a prime example) tend to be dramatically more profitable and get around messy confrontations with tenants and their rights. They limit the pool of available housing, so the value of remaining properties for council and longer term rent goes up further. Spiralling costs push more people out of their homes, leading to an influx of more AirBnBs, or new tenants from higher income brackets. Beyond that we have the constant harassment of land speculators helping to keep about 3,000 of our 44,000 homes empty while 1,500 households are on the housing register, according to HBC. It’s a vicious spiral that’ll see more than just the council out of pocket.
Oh, last October, a New Statesman journalist estimated that we have almost 1,000 AirBnBs in the town centre alone. Combine the empty homes and the holiday lets… and you’ll find a lot of greedy chisellers dining well tonight on silver platters. Don’t let it fool you: white powder is a main course.
But wait! Stop there. I’m up on my high horse, blood-boiling, ready to start the executions – that’s not entirely fair. In the interest of shoehorning some balance in here, I need to mention that a lot of our local landlords only have one extra property and, particularly with interest rates being what they are, they’re making barely any money off that property. We can’t be demonising these individuals. They’re just trying to survive. I might still, personally, question the decision to buy more than one home, but realistically most people aren’t weird idealists like I might be. They just want to have a pension or inheritance that they can understand and keep control of, or the most functional method of their moving house was to have more than one at once. Attacking this kind of landlord is like arresting someone for possession: it’s pointless and rude. I’m not attacking them. I’m attacking the people who landlord en masse, especially those who operate as companies: they are demonstrably having a horrific impact on this town.
So housing’s the big one. It’s the main factor that drove us to be 13th most deprived authority in 2019, and while “barriers to housing and services” dramatically worsened between 2015-2019, “living environment” seemed to substantially improve. I think some folks call that ‘gentrification’.
An honourable mention to social care, roads and highways, and the fiascos with Southern Water and the climate crisis, nevermind the state of the Conquest, our police force, or the academies.
A lot of these other costs and services aren’t even in the purview of Hastings Council. Nah – they’re East Sussex County Council, which has a lot more money and, yeah, you guessed it, is Tory-led. If you wonder why the roads and pavements never get fixed, well, it’s them, basically. Labour wouldn’t do much better, but they do tend to throw marginally more money at the deprived residents of places like Hastings (rather than the depraved residents of Tunny Wells with their Lib Dems and their Alliance) which is why our council was until recently run by increasingly miserable Labour veterans. Now eight of them are slightly happier Hastings Independents and apparently the only ones providing any moral or spiritual leadership for the town – the only ones looking after our soul! Or trying to. More on that as soon as they say more than a few sentences.
I’ll add a link here for anyone who wants to read a detailed breakdown of the preliminary budget (as soon as I’ve written it), so you can see the areas that might be worst hit by our required savings. Some of them, like an Anti-Social Behaviour prevention scheme, are going to be funded from alternate sources and not cut completely, or at least that’s the plan.
My main message here is that despite the horror and the chaos, it’s not all panic. The council are doing a fairly good job of holding fast, keeping the wolf away from the door. All that. I might be the bringer of bad news, but once you understand how bad the situation is… you can start to understand that the council’s actually holding the line (for now), which is good!
Head to part three: The big debate that wasn’t.