Wandsworth could lose up to 300 council homes in the coming months. At the same time, the building programme meant to replace them has just been partly cancelled.
The homes at risk come from Right to Buy, the legal right most council tenants have to buy their home at a discount. Last November, the government cut the maximum discount in London from £136,400 to £16,000 and gave tenants just 21 days to apply. The result was a national rush that left Wandsworth processing more than three years’ worth of applications at once.
That is one end of the squeeze. The other is the replacement programme. It has just been partly cancelled. The council that inherited both problems in May has not yet said what it intends to do about either.
A tenant who applied on 20 November could receive over eight times more than a tenant who applied two days later.
How Wandsworth’s Right to Buy backlog was created
The council normally receives around 180 Right to Buy applications a year. In the weeks around the November deadline, it took in the order of 600. Every one of those applications represents a home that may leave the council’s stock at a discount averaging around £112,000, against a cap of just £16,000 for anyone applying today.
The government announced the cut on 30 October 2024 and gave councils 21 days’ notice. Nationally, applications in 2024-25 reached 63,068, up 236% on the previous year, the highest in two decades.
An application is not a sale. The council must verify eligibility, value the property, and issue a formal offer, and nationally only around 40 to 50% complete. But hundreds of Wandsworth homes have entered the pipeline under terms the scheme no longer offers.
For a Wandsworth tenant who qualified for the full discount, the difference between applying before and after 21 November was more than £120,000. The average discount in 2023-24 was £112,771. Anyone applying today is capped at £16,000.
A leg-up that may not come again
The tenants caught in that window may be among the last Wandsworth families to buy at the old discount. For many, the scheme was precisely what it was designed to be: a route to ownership that would otherwise have remained out of reach. The backlog represents, in most cases, people who made a rational decision under the rules as they existed, in the time they had.
The question the numbers raise is not about those individuals. It is about what happens to the stock they leave behind.
What leaves, and what does not replace it
Every completed Right to Buy sale removes a home from the council’s rental stock permanently. The council’s own consultation response, submitted in January 2025, records 630 homes sold since 2012 against 538 replacement starts, which the council described as “broadly close.”
That framing is partly accurate. On raw numbers, Wandsworth’s replacement record is better than the national picture, where fewer than one in ten homes sold has historically been replaced.
But the council’s own document is more specific. It concedes that larger social rent properties are “not adequately replaced.” Family-sized homes are the category where the maths breaks down, and those are the homes most likely to be sold through Right to Buy. Against a waiting list of around 13,000 households, that specific gap matters more than the overall numbers suggest.
The building programme and what remains of it
The previous Labour administration came to office in 2022 pledging 1,000 new council homes and 50% affordable housing on new developments. As we reported in April, the affordable housing target ended at 35% after the planning inspector rejected the council’s proposed threshold, and social rent homes delivered fell well short of the headline figure.
The programme has now passed to a Conservative administration under leader Aled Richards-Jones, elected in May 2026. The manifesto committed to cancelling Labour’s plans for the Lennox Estate and the Ashburton cluster, covering proposed schemes at Innes Gardens, Cortis, Hayward Gardens, and Whitnell Way. Both cancellations were confirmed at hustings.
The fate of the borough’s largest regeneration, the Alton Estate in Roehampton, is a separate question. A £100m renewal plan, where 82% of those who voted in a ballot last October said yes, is not named in the manifesto cancellations. Block A demolition is already contracted. But the new administration has not yet confirmed whether the Alton Renewal Plan will proceed. Fleur Anderson, the MP for Putney, has made a public video with local residents calling for the plans to be kept, a signal the question is live and contested.
What happens next
The question is not political. It is arithmetic. Of the roughly 600 applications Wandsworth is processing, if the borough follows the national trend, somewhere between 240 and 300 could become completed sales, each a permanent reduction in the council’s stock.
What replaces them is a decision for an administration that has inherited a significant financial gap alongside the housing programme. It is being squeezed from both ends. It has not yet said how it intends to respond to either.
If you have a Right to Buy question
The council’s Home Ownership team handles Right to Buy enquiries. Contact details are at wandsworth.gov.uk/right-to-buy.
For information on eligibility, how discounts are calculated, and what has changed since November 2024, the government’s guidance is at gov.uk/right-to-buy-buying-your-council-home.
