The huge cost of maintaining ageing council houses and flats is revealed in a report by consultants today.

In Brighton and Hove it is more than £500 million over a 30-year period and that is an awful lot of cash, however the money is found.

It is unlikely the city council or its 13,000 tenants will be able to afford anything like that sum even over a lengthy period and the Government will be unwilling to stump up all the costs.

That makes it all the more likely Brighton and Hove, like many other housing authorities, will have to find other ways of managing their homes.

The trouble is the stock is becoming older and more fragmented as no new homes are built and many of the best are snapped up by tenants under the right-to-buy schemes.

Yet sound management demands these houses and flats should be properly maintained and the council's tenants deserve to be housed in decent homes.

What consultants found was that while day-by-day maintenance was fine, much of the stock was likely to need more radical and expensive work sooner rather than later.

Whoever manages the homes in future will be forced to put up rents by much more than inflation to pay for the repairs and renovations.

It may sound tough but it mirrors exactly what happens in the private sector, except that those who can't afford to pay don't.

That means somewhere along the line the taxpayers, whether local or national, will pick up a lot of the bill.