Social housing lists ‘would take 119 years to clear at current building rate’

Research shows generations of children in England will grow up homeless unless government addresses council housing debt, charity says

It would take more than a century to clear the social housing waiting lists in England at the government’s current speed of delivering new social homes, research by Shelter has shown.

The housing charity found that more than 1.3m households are on a waiting list for a social home, but only 12,198 were built by councils, housing associations or private developers across England last year. This equates to an average of 110 households waiting for every new social home delivered, and it would take 119 years to clear the waiting lists if building continued at the same rate.

Sarah Elliott, the chief executive of Shelter, said that if the government “continued to deliver social homes at a snail’s pace then none of us alive today will live to see the end of the housing emergency”.

“Unless the scarcity of new social homes is addressed, communities will continue to be ripped apart, and children will be trapped in homelessness for generations to come,” she said.

“While the number of new social homes has fallen off a cliff, homelessness has climbed to record levels, with families worrying their wait for a safe and secure home will exceed their lifetime.”

Shelter’s research found that in the last 15 years, the number of new social rent homes built annually decreased by 64%, while the number of homeless households in temporary accommodation increased by 155%.

In 20% of council areas across England not a single social home was built in the last two years, and in 30% of areas fewer than 10 were built. At the peak of social home delivery, in 1967, 46% of all new homes built in England were for social rent and councils provided almost all of them (97%).