SENIOR councillors have agreed to press ahead with new temporary homeless hostel accommodation in York.

Cabinet member Tracey Simpson-Laing said last night that City of York Council had a moral as well as a statutory duty to replace the crumbling current premises in Ordnance Lane, off Fulford Road.

She said there would always be a need for such accommodation, and there had been two previous attempts to upgrade the existing hostel which had both failed because funding had not been made available.

This time the £3.56 million would come from the council's own Housing Revenue Account Investment Fund.

The hostel current houses 32 temporary accommodation units, but Cabinet members agreed the building should be pulled down and replaced with new pre-fabricated "modular" factory-built units, at a cost of £3.56 million.

The units will be a mix of one and two bedroomed apartments, with cooking facilities and en suite bathrooms, as well as training areas and common rooms for meetings.

The use of the modular units will cut down the time between demolition of the old buildings and occupation of the new ones on the same site.