PEOPLE in need of temporary housing are being placed in 20-plus hotels and bed and breakfasts in Swansea and they are there for much longer than in the past.
All councils are facing homelessness pressures for reasons including a shortage of suitable housing and high private market rents. Prison leavers often need somewhere to live temporarily, as do refugees, victims of domestic abuse, and people involved in family breakdowns while legislative changes in 2022 placed extra homelessness responsibilities on councils.
Swansea Council offers some supported temporary accommodation but the majority of people in need are placed in unsupported hotels and bed and breakfasts.
Housing managers told councillors on a scrutiny committee that the use of hotels and bed and breakfasts has enabled the authority to meet its statutory duties and the vast majority of people placed there were single people rather than families.
Steve Porter, the council’s operations manager for community housing, said “probably over” 20 hotels and bed and breakfasts were being used. “We will take what we can get at the moment,” he said.
A committee report said 380 single people and families were in supported and unsupported temporary accommodation in Swansea. The figure was just under 50 at the beginning of 2020.
And the length of time people now spend in hotels and bed and breakfasts is nearly 100 days on average – more than double what it was at the start of 2020.
Mr Porter told the scrutiny programme committee that only one family was in a bed and breakfast currently. “From a family perspective we are doing okay,” he said. But he described the overall numbers in hotels and bed and breakfasts as “not great”.
The council has been converting buildings like the former Penlan district housing office into temporary accommodation and is close to opening a new 68-bed facility – formerly a police station – at the corner of Alexandra Road and Orchard Street in the city centre.
This 68-bed unit will reduce the numbers in hotels and bed and breakfasts. It was due to open in the autumn, then December, but Mr Porter said there has been a slight delay relating to fire regulations. The council is also looking to develop an as-yet-unidentified second city centre building for supported temporary accommodation.
Although the data shows the council is preventing fewer people from becoming homeless than in the past Cllr Andrea Williams, cabinet member for service transformation, said “an immense amount” of preventative work was being done. “It continues to be a challenging area,” she said. “The demand is not going away any time soon.”
She said more than 11,000 people in Wales were in temporary accommodation compared to 4,000 in 2019.
Long-serving councillor Mary Jones said she had started to assist renters in her Dunvant and Killay patch – one of Swansea’s more affluent wards – who have been made homeless through no fault of their own.
Cllr Peter Black asked if more private sector landlords were “retracting” from the sector. Mr Porter said this was the case. Landlords had expenses to cover, he said, rents were very high and some properties were more attractive to them as Airbnb rentals. Some landlords, he said, were just selling up.
Councils like Swansea can and do plug the housing shortage gap by buying ex-council houses, building new ones, liaising with housing associations and charities, and acquiring new-builds via legal agreements with developers when new schemes are given planning consent.
The cost of providing people with temporary accommodation is significant. A freedom of information request by the Local Democracy Reporting Service earlier this year revealed the hotel and bed and breakfast bill for Swansea Council was £6.26m in 2024-25 although it recouped nearly £3m of that from the Welsh Government.
Meanwhile the number of rough sleepers in Swansea remains low at 10 and the report said some of them did actually have somewhere to live.
Councillors on the committee said they sympathised with the housing predicament facing the authority and praised teams for their work.
“It’s a thankless task at the moment – I commend the department,” said Cllr Peter May.
