February 15, 2001 11:54: A LEADING Labour councillor has called for a tax hike to help homeless families and people who cannot afford homes.

Wycombe district councillor Ted Collins (Lab, Booker and Castlefield) wants the district council to put its taxes up to the maximum possible next year to provide more houses.

At present, homeless families have to be sent to Slough and Oxford to live in in bed and breakfast hotels because there is not enough space in Wycombe.

Cllr Collins told members of the district council's policy and resources committee on Monday: "If you have visited bed and breakfast as I have, you find families where the kids can't continue their schooling, husbands can't get work and mums lose the support of friends and families.

"It is a dreadful situation you need to see it."

He said families lived in one room and shared kitchens and washing facilities which they could only use at certain times.

Cllr Collins said thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money was helping to make bed and breakfast owners rich, rather than providing a long-term solution and spending to the limit could raise an extra million to use to provide local homes.

Cllr Peter Cartwright, chairman of council's housing and economic development committee, described the £637,000 spent annually on bed and breakfast accommodation as dead money.

He said: "It should be absolutely the last resort. At the moment it is taking up too much of our resources. That £637,000 should be down to nought."

The councillors' words were thrown into focus on Tuesday when young mother Anna Lia Ram rang to say she had been made homeless after a fire at her privately rented rooms on Friday.

All Wycombe District Council could offer her and two-year-old Priyanka was a bed and breakfast room in Slough at a rent of £66 a week.

Anna, who has just got a part-time job in High Wycombe and is arranging a child minder in the town, said she would have to get up at 5.45am to get Priyanka ready for the bus journey to High Wycombe going to the child minder first.

She wants to stay in the job, which she likes, but after paying the rent and the travelling she wouldn't have any money left if she went to Slough.

Anna added that officers had told her she might be there for a matter of days or it could be years.