Thousands of people cut from a council’s social housing register

Over 5,000 households have been removed from Ealing Council’s social housing register because of councillor’s decisions to axe a priority group amid soaring demands.

During a cabinet meeting last week, councillors agreed to change the rules of the social housing register in Ealing, a district in West London, affecting thousands of households. The changes come as the local authority predicts demand for social housing will soar due to rising costs.

Reported by Trust for London, poverty rates in the capital city are 5% higher than areas in Northern England. The organisation found poverty rates for non-White households were 39% and for single parents they were 53% during 2022.

Affecting almost half of the housing register, the local authority are set to reduce the number of priority bands from four to three, with Band D being cut – this includes applicants who have been registered as homeless.

It is estimated that by slashing this priority, 5,561 households will be affected and most of them do not meet the requirements for the other categories, meaning they can’t bid for another home on the register.

Cllr Steve Donnelly, the Cabinet Member for an inclusive economy, said: ‘Since this allocation policy was last reviewed in 2012, in the absence of any credible national housing policy, we have seen the demand for housing increase way ahead of the capacity of ourselves or other social housing providers.

‘Band D has no realistic prospect ever of being allocated a home and under this proposal, we want to be honest with people currently in Band D and everybody who may seek to apply for housing.

‘There are more than Enough people in Bands A, B and C to soak up such provision of housing as comes along. At the same time, we want to ensure that anybody in Band D should in fact have been promoted to Band C or above in the interim period is reassessed to ensure that everybody is in the right place.’

Under the current scheme, any household living in temporary accommodation, where the lease has ended, is given priority over households who have been homeless for a long period of time. The new proposals seek to change this by prioritising individuals who have been living in temporary accommodation or have been homeless for five or more years.

According to recent research, there are 700 households who have been in temporary accommodation for more than five years in Ealing and over the past decade the number of new households being given social housing has fallen by almost 50% – in 2011 the council let 1,012, but in 2021 it dropped to 526.

Photo by Rohan Reddy