Councils blows £3m in six months on housing homeless in hotels

A London council has spent over £3 million putting homeless people up in hotels in the last six months.

 
Between October 2012 and March 2013, the council paid £3,573,321 to hotel booking agency Polyglobe. 

Councillor Jonathan Glanz said: "The changes to housing benefit caps in particular, and the changes to welfare reforms, have meant that we have seen a huge increase in the number of people that are presenting as homeless.

"Although we have been redoubling our efforts to ensure that we have more and better self-contained accommodation for people, inevitably the sheer numbers of people that have come along have meant that we haven't been able to accommodate them all."