BOROUGH councillors have rejected a call to review the acquisition of ten homes, despite hearing it will cost more than £200,000 in fees to identify and conveyancing 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 three 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. Cllr Speight urged the cabinet to reconsider the appointment after telling councillors two extra homes could have been acquired if a better tender had been achieved.

He said he had been able to find tten suitable properties just by browsing Right Move and Zoopla and they could have been bought locally through borough estate agents, using local conveyancers, at a fraction of the cost.

After hearing no properties have yet been identified, committee chairman, Cllr 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 is 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, Labour councillor responsible for health and wellbeing, said the funding could be lost if it wasn't spent by March and that Phi is an approved contractor, enabling them to be appointing quickly. 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 wasn't 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, Cllr 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, 11 December. I'm proposing this callin 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."

However, after initially being passed on Cllr Byrne's casting vote, Cllr Byrne and other committee members were unable to come up with the wording for a recommendation to go to cabinet asking them to reconsider so Cllr Byrne cancelled the initial vote and he and vice chair Cllr Roy Jones voted with five Labour members to reject Cllr Speight's call for the issue to be reconsidered.

Conservative committee members Cllrs David Day, Tom Kelly and Paul Arnold, supported Cllr Speight's call-in but now the matter has been dropped and the council will press ahead with the original borrowing and spending plan.