THURROCK councillors have rejected a call to send the acquisition of ten new homes back to cabinet after hearing it will cost £200,000 to purchase them.
Thurrock Council has appointed Phi Capital to find suitable homes for the council to buy after acquiring £1.8million of Government funding in March to help with a growing problem of homelessness. The council will be contributing almost £1.5 million in match funding through borrowing.
Seven properties will be used to house homeless people in the borough, while two standard-sized homes and larger four-bedroom home will allocated for resettling Afghan refugees.
Neil Speight, Independent councillor for Stanford-le-Hope West said the estate agency and conveyancing fee charged by Phi amounted to £21,000 per property for the cash-strapped council. Mr Speight urged the cabinet to reconsider the appointment after telling councillors two extra homes could have been built if a better tender had been achieved.
After hearing no properties have yet been identified, chairman, Gary Byrne, said: “We are giving away £200,000 that we don’t need to and we haven’t identified properties. I spoke to a leading estate agent and a leading conveyancer both said if you give me £200,000 they would clear it within six weeks and they would go to a party, celebrate and laugh at Thurrock Council because this is an incredible amount of money.
“We are actually losing the value of a house at least and we’re spending £200,000 on conveyancinG. That’s a shocking deal. Unbelievably bad. This company are laughing at us. You get a local estate agent and they will get you 12 houses and give you £150,000 change.”
However, Mark Hooper, councillor responsible for health and wellbeing, said the funding could be lost if it wasn’t spent by March Phi is an approved contractor. He said: “. I do think this is a good news story for Thurrock. To bring ten new homes to Thurrock. One of the main issues for us is the time line. The funding became available in March. We bid for the funding and we were successful in getting £1.8million but then a general election was called and that delayed the whole process.
“The funding was already made available until September and then it became a real issue around speed because we have to spend this money by March 2025 so time was of an essence. To go through a tender process takes about six to eight months and we don’t have that time.”
In response, Mr Speight said: ““We knew about the money in March we could have started provisionally working so I think the General Election is a complete red herring.
“Cabinet meets next Wednesday, December 11. I’m proposing this because I want cabinet to think about what they did when they sat at that meeting and they didn’t dig deep. They didn’t ask the questions.”
