SENIOR councillors in Bournemouth have approved plans to buy a care home in a bid to boost the number of affordable facilities in the borough.

At a special meeting on Friday, members of Bournemouth council’s cabinet gave their blessing to the purchase of the new facility which, they said, could save the authority as much as £400,000-a-year.

Due to ‘confidentiality’ concerns, the council has yet to reveal which care home it is planning to take over nor how much it will pay for the home.

Councillors were told on Friday that officers had been working on the ‘complex’ deal for the past year and that it would provide ‘a much-needed boost’ to the amount of available affordable beds.

Cllr Blair Crawford, the cabinet member for adult social care, said: “It’s become increasingly difficult for the council to buy into this market.

“The costs of modernising existing homes are high and if you are going to build a new care home you really need to be looking at 60-plus beds to make it viable and charges often reflect the high building costs.”

He said that the council had looked into the possibility of building a new care home on land it already owns but were put-off by cost estimates of upwards of £7 million.

Cabinet members unanimously backed a move to allow council officers to complete the purchase.

Council leader, John Beesley, said: “This has been a long and fairly complex process to get us to this stage compare to most other asset acquisitions.

“This is more than just buying a care home, it’s the kind of acquisition we should be making if it can be achieved on the right terms.”

Rather than running the new care home itself, the council plans to hand it over to Tricuro – the company owned by the three top-tier local authorities in Dorset – on a 10-year lease.

Tricuro would manage the home which will house a mix of council-funded and privately-funded residents.

Speaking after the meeting, Cllr Crawford said he hoped that the purchase would be completed early in the new year.

“There’s an urgent need for the bed spaces so the sooner we get it over the line, the better,” he said.