At a glance
• Only about 5–6% of people on council housing registers in boroughs like Islington and Lambeth are rehoused each year
• Councils are removing thousands from waiting lists due to having no realistic chance of being housed
• Council housing now overwhelmingly goes to those in the most severe need
Only about five per cent of Londoners on the waiting list for a council home have any chance of being rehoused, a City Hall inquiry has been told.
Borough housing chiefs say a “housing emergency” has been caused by the huge number of homeless families that are given priority status and the dire shortage of properties available to councils to reallocate to people in need of a home.
Most of the capital’s councils already require people applying to join their housing waiting lists to have been resident in the borough for at least five years, up from three years in boroughs such as Islington.
The amount of time that Londoners can expect to spend stuck on the waiting list is worst for families needing larger homes.
Islington only lets out about four five-bedroom and 14 four-bedroom homes a year.
In Enfield, the average wait for a three-bedroom council home is 15 years. In Lambeth it is 12 years. In Redbridge it is 18 years.
Lambeth recently removed 10,000 applicants from its waiting list because they were in the fourth priority category and had no realistic prospect of ever getting a council home.
Ian Swift, deputy corporate director of housing at Islington Council, said it would house six per cent of residents on its housing register this calendar year.
“They’re likely to be the households in the most chronic need,” he told a London Assembly investigation into how council homes are allocated.
“Probably next year, because of the lack of acquisitions and new builds, it will be five per cent.
“Ninety-four per cent of people on our housing register today will not be housed in the next 12 months.”
Islington used to let out about 2,000 council homes a year – but this has fallen to 800.
Of these, 60 per cent are one-bedroom flats.
Hundreds of people bid for each vacant council home.
It is the latest example of the London housing crisis that last month resulted in the Government allowing London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan to temporarily change his rules on how many affordable homes developers are required to build.
Lambeth, which has 20,000 council homes, also only lets out 800 a year to people on its waiting list – while 3,400 families a year ask to join the list.
Lambeth has 28,000 households on its waiting list for a council home and 4,500 in temporary accommodation.
Richard Sorensen, director of housing needs at Lambeth, told the London Assembly: “Each quarter we see around 850 households approach us for assistance.
“The system is broken. This is not a ‘shortage of supply’ scenario. We are talking about a genuine housing emergency, where households cannot afford to live in London.
“The gap between rents and benefits is now so high that people are effectively priced out.”
Mr Sorensen said there had been a “massive increase” over the last three years in the number of families in temporary accommodation.
Almost all have to be placed in properties outside of Lambeth, due to the cost of central London. He said Camden had a similar problem, as did other inner London boroughs – the reason why so many primary schools were closing in the capital.
Islington has seen an 18 per cent increase in people asking for help because they were homeless.
This results in “enormous” costs being incurred by councils, which have to find temporary accommodation for homeless families.
Mr Sorensen said: “If the only way to get priority for social housing is to become homeless, more people will apply as homeless as the route into social housing. That is the brutal reality.”
He said the original aim of council houses being built for the “better off working class”, and with people having to prove that they would be a “good tenant”, had long disappeared.
Now homes were allocated on the basis of “severe need”, namely suffering poverty and deprivation.
In Lambeth, people applying to be housed by the council on the grounds of homelessness are “predominantly” black or Asian.
Only 20 per cent of homeless applicants are white British – though 56 per cent of the borough’s population is white British, Mr Sorensen said.
He said housing associations needed to do more to help families in the greatest need. There are 34,000 housing association homes rented in Lambeth but the council only gets 260 a year to allocate to people on its waiting list.
Many families ended up homeless because the local housing allowance – the amount low-income families can claim as a subsidy to help them pay their rent – has been frozen for years despite rents soaring.
Mr Swift said the average rent for a one-bedroom flat in Islington was £2,040 to £2,070 a month, while a larger home cost £2,700 a month.
He said private rents in the north London borough had risen almost 20 per cent in the last two years – putting them even further out of reach for many Londoners.
“We get 4,000 new homeless approaches every year,” Mr Swift said. “We let 900 properties, combined with housing associations.”
Islington has a policy of increasing the number of council homes on its books by buying back former local authority homes.
However it cannot rely on cash from London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan to do this – because the grants are too low.
Instead it can only afford to buy the homes with the help of the Government’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. A total of 250 former “right to buy” homes have been bought by the council in the last 12 months.
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