A council worker has received a reprimand for letting out of their council home after advertising on the Airbnb online lettings platform.
The letting breached the terms of the employee’s tenancy agreement, with the council sending a “letter of expectation” to the staff member after an investigation.
Council tenants are not permitted to sub-let their homes – even as a holiday let while they are away themselves.
Conservative councillor Anne Meadows told a meeting at Hove Town Hall yesterday (Tuesday 27 June) that the issue reflected local concerns about the growing number of holiday lets in Brighton and Hove.
Councillor Meadows, who used to chair the council’s Housing Committee, said:
“You start questioning … Does that individual need the council property? Or why wasn’t the property removed from them?
“Given the concerns raised about Airbnb in Brighton and Hove at Housing Committee, I start to question those sorts of things.
“That property could have been given to someone who needs it full-time. Instead, a ‘letter of expectation’ was written.”
Councillor Meadows was told that the member of staff still lived at the property and had let out their home through Airbnb while they were away.
Counter fraud manager Simon White said:
“It was clear they hadn’t really realised what they were supposed to be doing. That’s why it was a case of standard-setting.”
Brighton and Hove City Council’s Audit and Standards Committee was told that the listing had since been removed from the Airbnb website.
Details of the case were revealed as councillors discussed the council’s counter-fraud annual report for 2022-23.
Mr White said that people improperly sub-letting council homes as holiday lets was a national issue.
He said that councils across the country were working with the various listings websites such as Airbnb to gather data to tackled the problem.
The counter-fraud report also said that a school’s “purchase card” had been used fraudulently, with suspicious transactions having been flagged during checks.
The card turned out to have been cloned. The school was not identified in the report but was working with its bank to identify the fraudulent transactions and recover its losses.
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