Killisick Court and homelessness in Gedling Borough

District councils like Gedling have the legal responsibility to deal with homelessness in their area. For years many councils in the East Midlands have solved their homelessness problems by sending their homeless citizens to Nottingham City Council who kindly paid for their care. Two or three years ago, Nottingham City had finally had enough of paying for everyone else's homelessness problems and shut their doors to outsiders, forcing councils like Gedling to spend their own money on the problem. Since then, Gedling has had to employed officers (costing over £100,000 per year and still rising) to deal with this issue.

For many years Gedling has had a small homeless hostel in Colwick (we didn't send all of our homeless to the City, just most of them). This hostel is clearly substandard and was "condemned" as inadequate 4 years ago by councillors. The hostel is a large, old house, with ordinary houses on both sides (one of them was occupied for years by a councillor). The various occupants of the hostel have caused no problems that I know of. Families live there for some months whilst permanent accommodation is found for them. The alternative is bed and breakfast accommodation which is massively expensive and also highly destructive of family life.

Because of the decision by the City, Gedling needs much more homeless accommodation. The council has joined with Rushcliffe and Broxtowe councils in a joint bid for government funding to build a new hostel. This was successful and the new hostel is about to open in Arnold. This still leaves the Borough short of accommodation.

Killisick Court was a warden-aided establishment for the elderly. It was discovered that the building was defective, although only about 40 years old. When it was built, the metal ties were not put in that go across the cavity in the external walls and in one place the external wall is bulging.

Gedling needs a replacement for the Colwick hostel but has a considerable surplus of warden-aided accommodation - particularly bed sits, which are unpopular. The government policy (with all-party agreement) is to maintain the elderly in their own homes and this has, inevitably, led to a reduction in demand for warden-aided flats and bed sits.

Gedling does not have the money to build a new hostel for the homeless but it does have several, underused, blocks of flats/bed sits for the elderly. As Killisick Court needs repairing, which means moving out all the residents (costing about £100,000) to enable the work to be done, the only sensible course is to repair Killisick Court and, at the same time, convert it for use by the homeless. This would also achieve economies in the building work. The work was estimated to cost nearly £650,000, part of which would be recovered by selling the existing hostel in Colwick after its occupants transferred to the refurbished Killisick Court or to permanent accommodation.

This was gone into very thoroughly by the Council and the transfer out of Killisick Court of the existing tenants was accomplished very well by the Housing Department. Many of the tenants were very elderly so this needed to be handled with great care, and it was. Unfortunately, one individual made difficulties and the local newspaper chose to mis-report the whole issue in a sensationalist way, but otherwise the whole process went very well.

A group of councillors from all parties approved the original decision. A councillor from the Tory party then objected and insisted on a review of the decision to refurbish Killisick Court for use by the homeless. A new committee was set up with with 3 Tories, 3 Labour and 1 LibDem councillor (the same proportions as the council) and this group unfortunately divided on party lines with the Tories voting against the scheme (but offering no alternative) and the others voting for the scheme.

This brings us to early 2007, just before the elections. The council then had a Tory leader and he vetoed the scheme and under our highly undemocratic system, he is allowed to do this. This meant that the building had to be boarded up and the losses of £2,000 per week commenced. However, there have been other costs and we believe the total bill currently stands at nearly £200,000 and rising. There are also other costs as some homeless people have had to be put into bed and breakfast accommodation. We have recently asked for information about these costs.

We do not know if the Housing Department consulted local residents about the proposed scheme. Clearly they should have. However, the existing hostel has not caused problems, and there is no reason to believe the new hostel would.