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23
Jan 2023
Harrogate council paying £25,000 a month on hotels and B&Bs for homeless
Harrogate Borough Council is spending £25,000 a month on temporary hotels and bed and breakfasts for homeless people, a freedom of information request has revealed.
The council, which has a statutory duty to prevent homelessness, is paying individual hotels up to £126 a night because its hostels are full.
The figures highlight how acute and costly the issue of homelessness is in the Harrogate district.
The Stray Ferret submitted a freedom of information request after a well-placed source revealed some of the town’s best-known hotels were being paid to put up homeless people.
The council confirmed at the time it used hotels “as a last resort” but declined to reveal costs.
Following the FoI request it has now released details of the monthly amounts paid to each of the hotel and B&B accounts used to provide temporary accommodation for homeless people in the six months from April to September last year.
The names of the individual establishments have not been released to protect the identity of vulnerable people but the sums for each one range from £30 to £126 a night.
Two hotels each received more than £10,000 from the council in August and one received more than £13,000 in July. Payments are subsidised through housing benefits.
'No one should ever sleep on the streets'
The Stray Ferret asked the council about the sums and the amount of accommodation it had for homeless people in the district.
A council spokesperson said:
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