People waiting for social housing for 10+ years

People are waiting more than 10 years for a council house in most areas, it has been revealed.

A freedom-of-information request by the Lib Dems has revealed 82% of councils have had people waiting for a home for longer than a decade.

More than two-thirds (70%) of councils have seen waiting lists grow over the last six years, with a total of 368,975 people in line. That’s 44,000 more (13.4%) than in 2018-19.

Where have waiting lists grown most?

Waiting lists have more than doubled in:

• Oadby and Wigston (Leicester)
• Sevenoaks
• Wrexham
• Orkney
• South Tyneside
• Gateshead

Where’s the longest waiting list?

This one’s a little trickier to answer because there are lots of reasons someone might have been waiting a long time – some applications are prioritised over others and you could be on more than one waiting list at the same time.

One person who’s been on a list for a while can significantly distort average waiting times. For example, Waltham Forest said their average wait time was three years, with one outlier who’d been waiting 47 years.

We’ve looked at the data to see why some people have been waiting so long and where the longest waits have been recorded.

In most cases, councils said there was usually a reason why people are still on the list some decades later, including:

• ‘no housing need’ – Renfrewshire said this is why one person had been on the list for over 68 years but didn’t explain further
• requests suspended by the applicant – in one instance, Midlothian said the applicant had chosen to suspend for ‘lengthy periods’ for personal reasons so hadn’t been available for offers
• some people have registered and never bid on a home (not every area requires people to bid) – Wigan said this was why one person had been waiting nearly 45 years
• some people are waiting for a specific home – as in the case of one household in Orkney who’ve been waiting over 31 years
• people join a list ‘just in case’ – North East Derbyshire said one person with ‘no housing need’ joined as a precaution and has been on the list for over 35 years
• people have refused previous offers – one person in Aberdeen has refused 13 offers since 1989
• some people wanted to stay on the list despite not actively bidding – one person in Wiltshire said they wanted to remain on the list even though their last bid was in 2006

The longest waiting times (without any of the above reasons given) were in these five council areas:

• Dundee – 68 years
• East Herts – over 62 years
• Stratford – over 52 years
• Tendring – over 51 years
• Waverly – over 50 years

Why aren’t there enough social homes?

It’s not a secret that the UK is in the midst of a housing crisis – Shelter says there are now 1.4 million fewer social households in England than there were in 1980.

We’re losing council houses faster than we can replace them because:

• social housebuilding is at its lowest rate in decades (we built more in 1969 than in the last 12 years combined)
• too many homes have been sold through right-to-buy, or demolished

How is the government going to tackle the crisis?

We don’t know for certain how Labour are planning to tackle the problem, but reports suggest social rents will be hiked above inflation to allow for more affordable homes to be built.

This is expected to be confirmed in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first budget in October.

A government spokesperson told the Financial Times: “Work is ongoing to fix the foundations of our housing and planning system.”