Councillors have agreed to buy three blocks of flats as part of an expanding programme of purchasing properties to expand its stock of general and temporary housing.
Brighton and Hove City Council’s cabinet agreed to buy 19 homes across three sites in Freehold Terrace and Beech Grove, Brighton, and Vaughan Williams Way, in Rottingdean, with discussions about the cost held behind closed doors.
Labour councillor Gill Williams, the council’s cabinet member for housing and new homes, said that buying new-builds would help the council deliver at least 2,000 affordable homes over the next five years.
The 19 homes are a mix of one, two and three-bedroom homes – and Councillor Williams said that the latter were “much needed”.
She added said: “This further supports our aim to increase our housing supply of temporary accommodation and reduce our reliance on more expensive forms of temporary accommodation such as ‘spot purchasing’.
“Using 13 of these homes for temporary accommodation will create a saving of £164,000 a year.
“This demonstrates the importance of these purchases as a strategic investment aimed at reducing long-term costs and strengthening financial resilience.”
The council is looking to raise up to £50 million by 2030 by selling off property to fund buying or building more temporary and permanent housing.
A report to the cabinet said that the cost of “spot purchasing” emergency and temporary housing from the private sector was one of the biggest pressures on the “general fund” budget.
As of August, the budget for homes and adult social care for 2025-26 was forecast to be overspending by £7.4 million by the financial year-end. Two months earlier the predicted overspend totalled £9.3 million.
The council has budgeted to “spot purchase” emergency housing for 132 households a night but the forecast is currently for 485 households a night, resulting in a predicted overspend of £4.6 million.
Block-booked temporary housing is also overspent by more than £1 million, as the budget is set for 303 households a night but the council is supporting 424.
In the first six months of 2025, some 2,000 households a month were in temporary housing, with an average of 170 households a month presenting as homeless.
Among the reasons were the end of a private tenancy, accounting for roughly a third of those made homeless. A fifth could no longer stay with family or friends. And the largest proportion had a variety of other reasons.
The smallest group were those who needed housing because of domestic abuse although council figures showed that this proportion had increased, making up a fifth of those in housing need in June this year.
Labour councillor Jacob Taylor, the deputy leader of the council, said: “We’re a tiny city, only 270,000. That’s something like one in 70 people in this city are homeless and are in temporary accommodation.”
Councillor Taylor said: “What that represents is a total failure of the housing market and housing policy over 40 years.
“To patch up and paper over the cracks of that total failure of housing policy, our taxpayers’ money is being used to directly transfer to private landlords.
“Almost all of our overspend in this area is not from our council-owned properties.”
The council plans to sell unwanted property such as disused offices to raise, in the first instance, about £10 million, with the aim over the coming years of buying 200 homes for temporary housing. This is expected to reduce the significant sums paid to private landlords.
The council is looking to move remaining staff out of Bartholomew House to Hove Town Hall and to lease out the ground, first and second floors. The third and fourth floors are already leased to Freedom Works.
A small plot of land at Belle Vue Cottages is to be sold. Fifty homes could go on the site of three of the four Woodingdean Cottages in Warren Road – Ash, Oak and Beech – as well as the vacant outdoor swimming pool next door. It closed in 2008.
The council is also looking to sell property in Bond Street, with covenants for independent businesses, and to convert a former school, St Peter’s, in Portslade, into housing.
The approach set out at the cabinet meeting at Hove Town Hall on Thursday (16 October) was approved.
So I was doing some approximate maths, based on the savings reported here, and what we know about spot purchases in BHCC for TA. If all those were replaced in-house, that’s a saving of £6.1m per year.
Then, if you include the block-booked, you get less savings per unit because of the cheaper cost, but that’s still an additional £3.5m a year.
So in total, bringing TA in-house saves approximately £9.6m a year. Of course, this is just basic maths, and there are lots of factors to include – but generally speaking, there’s a net gain here.
These will make good airbnb flats. What are proposed costs of them and which agent? Anyone know
I looked on Google Maps-Beech Grove isn’t a Block of Flats, it’s a close of Houses in Lower Beavendean-that’s weird advertising.