Wandsworth council taxpayers are spending £28.6 million this year housing homeless families in temporary accommodation while they wait for a permanent home: up 20% on last year, with another overspend forecast, and a queue that is getting longer, not shorter.
It is one of several budget lines in deficit and it is the one the Conservatives have focused on most sharply in this election campaign.
The numbers are not easy to defend. The temporary accommodation bill has risen by £6 million in a single year. The queue grew by 17% in the same period. Families waiting for council homes cost the council up to £2,226 a month while a council home costs £645.
At last week’s Roehampton hustings, Conservative candidate Nick Austin challenged the bedroom mix in the council’s landmark Alton development, citing 14,000 people on the waiting list, 4,000 in temporary accommodation, and a net gain of just 14 family homes across the entire scheme.
Labour’s Cllr Jenny Yates went on the attack: it was “quite insulting to say that a two-bedroom home isn’t a family home.” Austin responded that it is the National Planning Policy Framework, not him, that defines family homes as three bedrooms or larger.
But throughout this exchange, neither candidate discussed a crucial figure: the wait time for a family needing a two-bedroom home – a figure that, more than any other, is driving the millions of pounds of over-spending. The council’s response arrived two days after the hustings, having taken no less than seven months to provide: families are waiting on average over two years (25 months) for homes.
What the money is buying
Temporary accommodation is not social housing. It is mostly private flats and houses leased from landlords at nightly rates, occasionally B&Bs with shared facilities. Around a third of Wandsworth’s placements are outside the borough entirely: Croydon, Lambeth, or further afield. Families pay rent through Housing Benefit, contact the landlord directly for repairs, and can be moved at any time. It’s an arrangement that pleases no-one.
Government grants cover £8.9 million of the annual bill with council taxpayers – you – funding the remaining £28.6 million.
The 3,947 children currently in temporary accommodation have already waited over two years (27 months) on average. Those rehoused last year had waited an average of three-and-a-half years (43 months) before getting a permanent home. The council overspent its homelessness budget by £6 million last year. The queue grew 17% in the same period.
Why the queue isn’t clearing
The housing department itself acknowledged at a scrutiny committee meeting in June 2025 that the pipeline of new council homes is skewed toward smaller units: the wrong size for most families on the waiting list. The programme it has put in place to compensate – making offers to existing tenants that are no longer using all their bedrooms to free up larger properties – is producing results, but the council’s own papers acknowledge it “hasn’t really delivered the outcomes we want.”
Why the system produces this outcome, and what both parties have contributed to it, will be examined in a second article on this issue.
A department that took seven months to confirm its own queue length
The council only revealed the figure for how long families were waiting for council houses (and so reducing the bill to taxpayers) after a seven-month battle with a member of the public. The council’s FOI team sent the same holding reply in December, January and March: “we are currently still waiting to receive the information that you have requested from the Council’s Housing department.” Word for word, three times.
It is an approach Putney.news has become all too familiar with; the Housing department in particular fails to hand over information until pressured for the third or fourth time, by which point all but the most determined requestors have given up.
But the issue is much larger than a delay in information: a department that spends £28.6 million of public money annually could not tell its own team how long the queue is. Nobody escalated the issue. Nobody treated it as urgent. That is what it looks like when an institution has stopped treating accountability as a requirement.
This story is part of our housing accountability series. Previous pieces cover why nearly 4,000 children are in temporary accommodation, how the council’s housing chief described the planning inspector’s verdict to Cabinet, and what the council’s own records show about its homes-building claims.
