HUNDREDS of homeless families spent an average of 20 days in unsuitable B&Bs in Edinburgh last year, despite a legal limit of seven days, new figures have revealed. The stats for 2018/19 sparked fresh concerns about the council’s reliance on B&Bs to accommodate homeless people.

Edinburgh City Council insists that it is tackling the problem, with stats from April to October this year showing a marked improvement for families. But a Freedom of Information request made by the Sunday National for figures over the last three full financial years showed that the money spent on accommodating homeless families there more than trebled in three years. The cost in 2016/17 was £313,905 but rose to £1,107,014 in 2018/19. In total more than £11m was spent on B&Bs for homeless people in Edinburgh last year.

In 2018/19 397 families spent more than seven nights in a B&B – a reduction on the previous year. But 167 had to stay for more than a month, living in rooms where parents, children and siblings often have to share beds and communal bathrooms are shared with other homeless residents.

A total of 41 families lived in a homeless B&B for more than two months and two families were there for more than three months. Conditions are often poor and cooking facilities minimal if they exist at all.

In a follow-up email the council told the Sunday National that the average time families spent in B&Bs was now down to ten days. But campaigners raised concerns about its ability to meet plans to extend the rules allowing B&Bs to be used for a maximum of seven days to all homeless people.

The change in regulations will take place from May 2021.

The figures obtained also reveal that single homeless people – who do not have, or are not living with their children – spent an average of 127 days in B&B accommodation last year – 369 spent over six months there and 196 people over a year living in a single room, often without cooking or washing facilities.

The city’s homeless services have under increasing pressure in recent years due to UK Government benefit caps and rising rent making more and more families homeless.

Graeme Brown, director of Shelter Scotland, said: “B&B accommodation is harmful to children’s health and life chances. How can the council claim to be getting it right for every child when its own homelessness service is sending families to live in unsuitable accommodation?

“It is astonishing that as the Government has ruled that not even adults should be spending more than seven days in this type of accommodation the city of Edinburgh council has had some families in them for a month or more. Questions must also be raised about the financial cost of failure given the three-fold increase in the cost of accommodating families in B&Bs over two years.”

He claimed that the solution was to build more social housing. He added: “Scotland is currently witnessing the biggest expansion in social housing since the 1970s but against a backdrop of almost 40 years of decline this just has to be the start. There are currently no plans in place for what happens after 2021 and we urgently need a commitment that Scotland will keep building.”

Pauline Bowie, of Low Income Families Together (Lift), which supports homeless families in the city, said many parents were still being offered substandard B&Bs such as Almond Lodge and Abbots House, which the charity claims are dirty and substandard.

“It’s totally down to a lack of accommodation,” said Bowie. “We tell families to use a lawyer to make sure they are moved within seven days.

But it’s the ones who don’t know their rights I worry about. Nobody at the council informs them about their rights and workers are still saying it could be up to six weeks. It just shouldn’t be happening at all. Kids should not be sharing beds with their mum, the bathroom with strangers. A lot of the accommodation is awful.”

On the plans to introduce the seven day limit for all homeless people she said: “It’s a massive concern. I don’t know who they are going to do it.

We’ve got other families who are in temporary accommodation for years.

Something needs to be done.”

Pauline McNeill MSP, Scottish Labour’s housing spokeswoman, said it was clear that Edinburgh City Council was struggling and that more Scottish Government intervention was needed. “It’s been in crisis for some time,” she said. “It seems clear that there needs to be a higher level of intervention to turn this around. It’s horrendous that families have been spending so much time in B&Bs.”

But Councillor Kate Campbell, convener of the Housing, Homelessness and Fair Work committee, said that figures from the last six months showed that the council was slowly turning things around. While the average time spent in a B&B from April to October 2018 was 24 days, in the same time period this year that had reduced to 10 days and the number of household had reduced from 327 to 209. Costs had also been reduced dramatically.

She said: “We’ve been absolutely clear that taking families out of B&Bs is our number one priority so I’m glad that the number of families in B&B has reduced significantly since it peaked in February 2018, alongside a continuing reduction in the number of breaches of the unsuitable accommodation order. The figures demonstrate the work that we are doing, but it is extremely challenging.

“Housing in Edinburgh is expensive and presentations are increasing from the private sector, mainly because of affordability. Although we are building as many social homes as we possibly can, spending more grant funding than we are allocated, there just aren’t enough social homes yet for the number of people presenting as homeless.”

The council is increasing its Private Sector Leasing (PSL) contact to ensure it has more temporary flats, she added, and is introducing alternative models such as house shares to give people access to kitchens and washing machines. “We’ve also put a focus and resource into prevention,” she added. “But there’s still lots more to do so we have to keep coming up with new ideas and new ways to address the challenges we face.”

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “We are clear that breaches of the Unsuitable Accommodation Order where families with children are accommodated in a B&B for longer than seven days are unacceptable.

The Housing Minister met with City of Edinburgh Council in September to make it clear that they must meet their statutory duties and to hear what plans they have to ensure that breaches do not occur in future.

It recognised the challenge that the extension of the Unsuitable Accommodation order t homeless households posed, she added, and would support councils implement it.