Crawley Borough Council has declared a housing emergency

SussexWorld

Crawley Borough Council has declared a housing emergency. Council leader  Michael Jones will write to Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, asking him to help councils and housing authorities such as Crawley and to ‘unfreeze’ the Local Housing Allowance. Mr Jones said: “In recent years, Crawley has experienced a perfect storm in relation to temporary accommodation. We’ve seen huge increases in homelessness demand on the back of the national housing crisis, the lack of housing supply and the cost of both ownership and rental.”

Transcript

00:00 Tonight at Crawley Borough Council, Councillors declared a housing emergency. This is because

00:09 the costs for temporary accommodation that the Council face have increased incredibly

00:15 over the past five years. Back five years ago, temporary accommodation for things like

00:20 nightly pay, bed and breakfast, hostels, accommodations such as that, where if someone had been evicted

00:26 from their house, they could be housed by the Council to stop them being homeless. However,

00:34 the numbers of people that are finding it increasingly unaffordable to get rents and

00:39 the number of private landlords that are exiting the market because they can't afford the mortgages

00:44 has increased by so much that we have nearly 500 households in Crawley that are affected.

00:54 This is extremely concerning. The amount that it costs the Council in temporary accommodation

00:59 because of these increases, it takes up an increasingly large proportion of the budget.

01:06 This year, one in every three pounds that this Council spends will be spent on temporary

01:10 accommodation. It has gone up in the last year by two million pounds. This year, it

01:15 is also expected to increase by two million. And if increases next year, as is expected,

01:20 it might by another two million. We will literally be spending half of the Council's money on

01:26 temporary accommodation before we spend a penny on anything else. It's deeply concerning.

01:31 Issues with government funding have a significant link to it. They currently pay the government

01:37 based on 2011 housing prices, which is just totally unacceptable. But there is an issue

01:45 in Crawley and in other areas such as Hastings, Worthing and Eastbourne and places like that

01:54 where these prices are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the size of the Councils

01:59 that we represent. Something has to be done. And we've put up a red flag today and called

02:05 on the government to actually take action. We very much hope that they listen, but we

02:10 will work to continue to make sure that they listen.

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