Borough sees housing waiting list fall from 10,000+ to 1,100 after policy switch

A London borough has taken radical measures to shrink its housing waiting list and encourage low cost home ownership.

Hammersmith & Fulham has limited its waiting list to those with a five-year connection to the borough and a combined salary of less than £40,200, or those eligible for social housing.

It said its list had dropped from more than 10,000 names to just 1,100.

The authority has instead sought to direct people to low cost ownership options, and said some 5,000 local people had applied for these.

Hammersmith & Fulham has the fourth highest house prices in the UK and the average deposit needed is well in excess of £50,000.

Low cost options are accessed through the council’s home buy register – separate from the waiting list – and the council has decided to give top priority to existing council and housing association tenants with a household income of up to £66,000, followed by members of the armed forces, police officers and others who live or work in the borough.

Cabinet member for housing Andrew Johnson said: “Our register for low cost home ownership is now nearly five times greater than that for social housing.

“There is an insatiable appetite from people in this borough to get onto the housing ladder and this council is determined to do all it can to help residents on low to medium incomes to achieve their housing dreams.”

He said the Conservative-controlled council believed “in a property owning democracy and [that] owning your own home gives you a greater stake in your community”.

Hammersmith & Fulham has also set up a company to build homes for low cost ownership and expects to complete 500 over the next decade.

Andy Slaughter, the borough’s Labour MP and a former council leader, described the moves as “the Hammersmith house of horrors”.

He said: “Thousands of families currently awaiting new homes will find themselves thrown off the housing register; new tenants will be subjected to draconian short-term tenancy agreements, and those people who are lucky enough to survive this tsunami of bureaucracy will face above-inflation rent increases.”