Wandsworth Council plans to go back to selling off its larger, more valuable council houses when they fall empty, instead of letting them to another family.
These are council homes on ordinary streets, most of them family houses, many with gardens. When a tenant moves away, goes into care or dies with no one entitled to take the tenancy on, the house falls empty. At the moment, the council lets it to the next family on the waiting list.
That list is long. Around 13,000 households are waiting for a council home in Wandsworth. Of the families in temporary homes, 1,213 need three bedrooms or more. Housing charities worked out last year that a Wandsworth family needing a council home that size faces an 82-year wait.
The Conservatives, who won back the council in May, want to put the most valuable empty houses up for sale. The money could go on repairing the council’s other homes or on buying cheaper ones.
The council’s leader, Cllr Robert Morritt, told councillors in September that there is only so much money for housing. Choosing between building new homes and looking after existing ones, he said, “my preference will unashamedly be that we focus on existing stock”.
He also told them what a council home had meant to his own family. His parents bought their first home under Right to Buy. “It provided my parents and their two small boys, me and my brother, with a springboard to a better life,” he said.
Selling empty council homes was Wandsworth policy from the 1980s until Labour took over in 2022 and stopped it. Cllr Aydin Dikerdem was Labour’s housing chief at the time. He said the council would now “hold on to quality, larger houses with gardens or ground floor access, which typically meets the needs of larger families, or individuals with specific health requirements”.
“We believe that the value of a house as an asset is as important as its financial worth,” he said.
The last time the council sold houses like these, between 2015 and 2022, the sales raised £83m. Most of it, £67m, bought cheaper homes at auction, and the council ended up with 35 more homes than it sold. But the big houses with gardens were mostly replaced with flats, often in poorer areas.
If the Cabinet approves the plan on 9 December, the council’s stock of larger houses will keep falling. It is already losing them through Right to Buy, which lets most council tenants buy their home. The council has admitted that larger homes lost that way are “not adequately replaced”.
Labour’s leader on the council, Cllr Simon Hogg, made the same point about Right to Buy when he replied to Morritt. “Many people benefited, but I’m afraid those homes were not replaced,” he said.
The new plan itself is hard to pin down. It says an empty house “will be sold” if the council could buy a cheaper replacement. It then says the council may keep it for a family in urgent need. And it may, or may not, spend the money on that replacement. It does not say how many houses will go, or what they should raise.
Neither approach has dented the number of families without a settled home. Households in temporary accommodation rose from 2,312 in 2021, the last full year of Conservative control, to 2,890 in 2022 and 4,314 now, including more than 4,400 children. Families who finally got a permanent home in 2024/25 had spent nearly four years waiting in temporary accommodation.
The council has not consulted anyone on the change and has no plans to. The plan goes to the council’s Borough Residents’ Forum next Tuesday and to its housing scrutiny committee on 25 November. The Cabinet will make the final decision on 9 December.
The debate comes as councils across London wrestle with how to house families on long waiting lists. In Greenwich, the council has set out a plan to end rough sleeping by 2030, while in Sutton 359 new homes were approved at St Nicholas House.
