Council may buy its own B&B to tackle homeless problem

By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporter

Powys County Council wants to stop paying for B&B accommodation to put up homeless people, and is even considering buying its own to tackle the problem.

At a joint meeting of all three Powys County Council’s scrutiny committees, councillors and lay committee members discussed the authority’s performance during the third quarter of 2024/2025 from October to the end of December.

They looked at the council’s Corporate and Strategic Equality Plan Scorecard which evaluates performance against its own expectations against three council objectives.

Plaid Cymru’s Cllr Gary Mitchell brought up the measure that shows there were 255 households in temporary accommodation in Powys including bed and breakfasts (B&B) at the end of December which had fallen from 265 at the end of September.

Cllr Mitchell asked: “How long might the average wait be in that temporary accommodation?”

Deputy council leader and cabinet member for housing Labour’s Cllr Matthew Dorrance said: “Temporary accommodation stays really concern me. I would like to see us cease using B&Bs as temporary accommodation altogether. The service has been challenged to do that.”

But to do this, Cllr Dorrance explained that more of the council’s permanent housing stock is being used for temporary accommodation while people’s needs are assessed.

Cllr Dorrance said: “Where possible those (people) are being flipped into secure tenancies. The market in Powys for private rented options is limited.”

Head of Housing, Andy Thompson, said: “The average stay in B&Bs is 45 days and that is coming down.

“We’re trying to keep people in accommodation for as short a time as possible. We are using 45% of our void properties, which is better than B&Bs.”

Voids are council properties that have just been vacated by tenants and have not been rented out to anyone else yet.

Mr Thompson said: “We do have a building programme that is scheduled to build 421 new council houses before 2031 – the target was 350 and we want to make that bigger.

“The more we can build the better as the root cause of homelessness is lack of housing. One of the issues we find in Powys is that most of our homeless clients are single people or couples.

“This means they are impacted by social security limitation, for example the bedroom tax (spare room subsidy) would apply to them so it’s not wise for them to move into larger properties.”

He added that the council is “hoping” to build its own temporary accommodation, and a trial scheme will be going ahead in north Powys soon in a bid to reduce the reliance on B&Bs.

Mr Thompson added: “We are considering buying our own type of B&B for emergency overnight stuff.”