Blackpool to buy 60 failing guesthouses and turn them into family homes

Blackpool council is to buy 60 former guesthouses in the streets behind the Promenade and convert them into family homes, in a £31m attempt to reverse the slide of the resort’s inner wards into some of the most deprived housing in England.

The scheme, approved by the council’s executive on Monday, will use compulsory purchase where owners refuse to sell. It focuses on four streets in the Bloomfield and Claremont wards where, according to the council’s own survey, 52% of the Victorian terraces built as boarding houses now operate as houses in multiple occupation (HMOs), with up to 12 rooms let to single adults, many of them on housing benefit and placed there by other councils.

Blackpool has about 3,000 HMOs, the highest concentration in the country relative to its population, and the resort’s tourist trade has not needed the rooms since the 1980s. The council says the model, in which a landlord can earn £60 to £80 a week per room with minimal investment, has driven out families and dragged down the town’s health and school statistics. Male life expectancy in Bloomfield is 68, the lowest of any ward in England.

“These houses were built for a fortnight’s holiday, not a lifetime in one room,” said Carol Benton, the council leader. “We have tried licensing, we have tried enforcement, and the business model is simply too profitable. The only way to change what these streets are is to own them.”

Under the plan, each house will be gutted and rebuilt as two or three self-contained homes, mostly two- and three-bedroom, let at social rents through the council’s housing company. The first 12 properties, on a single street off Central Drive, have already been bought and work will begin in January. The council expects the full programme to produce 150 homes over four years.

The funding combines £18m of council borrowing, £9m from Homes England and £4m from the Lancashire combined authority’s brownfield fund. The council says the scheme will pay for itself over 30 years through rent and through savings on the £11m a year it spends on temporary accommodation and on services for the inner wards.

Landlords’ representatives described the plan as “expropriation by a council that could not run a bath”. Anthony Moss, who owns nine HMOs in the area and chairs a local landlords’ group, said the council was “buying the problem and renaming it”. He added: “The people in those rooms do not vanish when the council takes the keys. Where are they going?” The council says it will rehouse every lawful occupant, and has 240 one-bedroom flats under construction on the former Blackpool airport site.

Residents who have stayed were cautious. Sandra Kay, who has lived on one of the four streets since 1979 and watched the house next door turn from a family guesthouse into a 10-room HMO, said: “I have had the police here four times this year. If they knock it through and put a family in, I will be first at the door with a cake.”