Over 340,000 Londoners were on the waiting list
Thousands of Londoners are stuck on housing waiting lists(Image: Charlotte Wilson/Offside, Offside via Getty Images)
More households were on London’s social housing wait list this year, new figures show. Housing charity Shelter said people have been pushed into homeless as successive governments have “failed to build enough genuinely affordable social rent homes”.
Figures from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government show there were 341,421 households on London’s housing registers, meaning they were on the wait list for social housing, as of March 31. It was a 2 per cent increase from 336,357 in 2024. Waltham Forest’s housing register saw the largest increase in the region, rising 31 per cent. Meanwhile, Richmond’s wait list fell by 46 per cent.
Across England, over 1.3 million households were waiting on social housing at the end of March. It was up 1 per cent on the year before, representing an increase of 9,833 households. The MHCLG said this was the highest number of households on housing registers since 2014.
The government has been criticised for failing to provide enough affordable social housing(Image: mtreasure via Getty Images)
It added housing registers can be affected by reviews to remove households who no longer require housing; however these reviews may not be carried out frequently.
As a result, the total number of households on registers is likely to overstate the number of households who still require housing.
Mairi MacRae, director of policy and campaigns at Shelter, said: “The severe lack of social homes means that a safe and secure home is only a distant dream to the over 1.3 million households stuck on social housing waiting lists in England. For decades, successive governments have failed to build enough genuinely affordable social rent homes, all while rents have rocketed to levels families simply cannot afford.”
She added: “Thousands have been pushed into homelessness as a result, with some stuck in grotty B&Bs and mouldy hostels and others moved miles from their communities, jobs and schools. The only way to help families off waiting lists is for the government to build more social homes. It must set an overall national target for the delivery of social rent homes and ramp up to building 90,000 a year for ten years – enough to end homelessness for good.”
Some 56 per cent of households who received social housing across the country in 2024-25 were on the housing register for less than a year.
Meanwhile, 7 per cent of households were on the housing register for five years, with 3 per cent waiting for over 10 years. An MHCLG spokesperson said the figures are “completely unacceptable”.
They added: “We’ve inherited years of failure to build enough social homes that has left too many people stuck on housing waiting lists. We’re taking urgent action to address this by delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation, backed by £39 billion investment, and sweeping measures stripping away barriers for councils to build at a scale not seen in years.”
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