100 Year Wait For Family Housing

Ranald

h

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/09/hundred-year-wait-family-size-social-housing-england

Hard to believe!

noonebelieves

Good Lord !! 😮

Kimi87

This is why I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for people under occupying. They were given an appropriate size home to meet their needs previously, but now want to deny others that opportunity by staying put.

Girl_No1

https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/comment/1014552#Comment_1014552

I agree and disagree with you at the same time.

My partner's friend has been waiting seven years to be allocated a smaller home. His sister waited five years. One of my brothers waited two years and eventually accepted a small flat in a multi-storey as the guilt was getting to him. I think in many (most?) cases it's not that people are unwilling to release properties, it's that there is nowhere suitable for them to relocate.

The real problem, imo, was the policy that allowed tenants to buy (steal) taxpayers' assets at knockdown prices. Particularly smaller properties that were at that time occupied by elderly people who had moved from family homes into bungalows/terraced ground floor properties. That's exactly where the people I've described above would previously have gone.

This permanently removed them from the social housing market, and creates the problems for those under-occupying at present there is nowhere for them to go!!

Those properties, in my area at least, are now predominately in the hands of landlords (having been sold by the sons/daughters who inherited them) who charge 3x or 4x the social housing rate for the same properties.

That's where the real problem lies.

Kimi87

I knew someone would give that reply, trying to downsize is not what I class as "staying put" which is the language I used.

Staying put is making no effort to move, or complaining and trying to find a loophole when a tenancy but not property is inherited.

Ranald

So glad I came back to Scotland when I did. Merton is third worst on that list.

No wonder the woman in the Civic Centre in Morden looked so startled, when I asked to put my name down!