Ten thousand Wandsworth council tenants will face a second annual rent rise, on top of the normal one, from next year under plans the council puts to tenants tonight.
The rent rises will cost tenants an extra £1 a week, about £4.30 a month, from April 2027, then £2 a week more every year after, for as long as it takes their rent to reach a set government target based on house size and value.
For 6,092 of those homes, the council’s own figures say that will take six years or more. Tenants over 75 are the furthest behind, on average £28.45 a week below the target, so the oldest tenants pay the extra for longest. Three in four one-bedroom flats are below the target.
The extra money goes into the council’s housing account. That account has less in it than the council planned, and its interest bill is set to more than treble over the next ten years.
Council tenants are the third group in the borough this month to learn they will pay more. Owners of homes worth £2m or more face a new mansion tax of at least £2,500 a year from April 2028, and reports say the line could fall to £1.5m. Every household faces the council’s plan to nearly double council tax next April. That is a 94% rise in the whole bill, about £1,000 a year more for a typical home, from about £640 for the smallest to £1,916 for the largest. Tenants pay neither. Their bill arrives as rent: the normal rise, and now a second one on top.
Who actually pays
Two thirds of the affected tenants will not pay it themselves. The council’s own assessment says 6,819 of them, about 68 per cent, get Housing Benefit or the rent part of Universal Credit. For them, the council says, the extra cost “is in effect covered fully by the Government”.
The other 3,160, about 32 per cent, pay their own rent. They are not on housing benefits, so the extra comes out of their own pockets. Of them the council says: “Current data does not establish the affordability of the increase for these households.” In plain terms, the council has not checked whether they can pay, because it says it does not know what they earn. That is the question its own assessment was meant to answer. It does say that older tenants on fixed incomes, disabled tenants and carers “may have less capacity to absorb an increase”. The paper recommends going ahead anyway, with help offered through rent letters, benefits advice and the council’s support teams.
The Government set the rule in January. If a council tenant’s rent is below the Government’s target for a home of that size and value, the council may add up to £1 a week in April 2027. From 2028 it may add £2 a week every April, until the rent catches up. Each council chooses whether to do it, and by how much. Wandsworth has chosen the most the rule allows: its finance paper “assumes maximum rent increases”.
Six in ten of the council’s homes are below that target: 9,969 out of about 16,550. Every pound added stays in the rent for good, and the normal yearly rise is then worked out on the higher figure.
The paper, written by Fenella Merry, the council’s finance director, says the extra rent would bring in £500,000 in the first year and £1 million more in the second. By 2037 it adds up to about £37 million. The money would pay for repairs to the homes it already has and mean the council borrows less. Counting on it has already cut what the council plans to borrow for repairs from £212 million to £123 million.
The housing account needs it. It finished last year £7.1 million short of what the council had planned to have put by. The council intends to borrow £848 million over ten years, £725 million of it to rebuild estates and build new council homes. Its interest and repayments would rise from £17 million a year now to £55 million by 2036, a quarter of everything it collects in rent. That borrowing plan already assumes tenants will pay, and the convergence rises come on top of a 4.8% rise this April.
The bills it lists are fire safety work, damp and mould, inflation and higher interest rates, plus the costs that followed the C3 rating the housing regulator gave the council last year, its second-lowest mark. Little extra Government money has come to meet them. The survey of the council’s homes that is meant to show the true repair bill was running late in August, against a December finish. And the regulator that signs off work on tall blocks is typically taking 35 weeks to do so, which the paper says is pushing up the cost of consultants and builders.
Even with the extra rent, the council expects the money in the account to fall from about £166 million now to about £136 million in ten years, and to about £100 million in twenty. It climbs back to £167 million by 2056.
What happens next
The paper goes to the Borough Residents’ Forum, the council’s meeting with tenants’ representatives, tonight at 7.30pm. That meeting is the consultation the council has planned before Cabinet decides. The Housing Overview and Scrutiny Committee considers it tomorrow, Thursday 1 October, in public at the Town Hall. Cabinet decides on 12 October. Full Council is not asked to vote.
A yes on 12 October does not by itself raise anyone’s rent. In January the council sets rents for the year, and that is when it decides whether to add the extra from April, up to the £1 a week maximum in the first year. The rent letter that lands next spring is where tenants will find out.
The council also says it will look again at how much the housing account can borrow early next year, when the survey should show what the repair bill really is.
What you can do
- Council tenant? Your rent letter or the housing service can tell you the target rent for your home and how far below it you are. The gap decides how many years of extra rises you would face.
- Have your say before the decision. The Housing Overview and Scrutiny Committee meets in public tomorrow, Thursday 1 October, at Wandsworth Town Hall; the papers and agenda are on the council’s democracy site. Cabinet decides on Monday 12 October.
- Write to the Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr Matthew Corner, at cllr.m.corner@wandsworth.gov.uk, or to your ward councillors through the council’s find your councillor page.
- Worried about paying? The council’s tenancy support and financial inclusion teams are named in the paper as the route for tenants in difficulty. Benefits advice may change what you pay if your circumstances have changed.
- Read the documents. Paper 26-232 and its four appendices, including the Equality Impact Needs Assessment, are public.
