Wandsworth’s housing crisis has the same cause. Both parties helped create it.

The housing queue in Wandsworth is over two years long for a two-bedroom home, and costing taxpayers £28.6 million a year by housing families in temporary accommodation while they wait. That bill is rising by 20% a year.

It is partly a management failure: the council’s housing department was recently overhauled because of its unhealthy, entrenched attitudes. But the bigger issue is that there simply aren’t enough homes of the right size, and that is the result of decades of unhelpful housing policies. Those problems have been made worse by the current administration’s attempted fix.

Wandsworth has been producing the wrong homes for years: too many one and two-bedroom units, not enough for families. Both main parties contributed to building that system. Neither has a credible plan to dismantle it.

Wandsworth is spending £28 million of your council tax on temporary housing. The queue is getting longer.

How the wrong homes get built

The mechanism is straightforward. Developers who want fast-track planning approval must provide 35% of their scheme as affordable housing. To hit that percentage while keeping the scheme financially viable, developers maximise the number of units: building small. One and two-bedroom flats are cheaper to construct per square metre and generate more revenue per square metre than three and four-bedroom family homes.

The affordable housing requirement, designed to help people, produces a glut of the wrong homes.

Wandsworth Council’s own Housing Background Paper acknowledges this directly. The modelled need for one-bedroom market housing, it notes, “is particularly low.” The council “have not sought to reflect this entirely as this would result in a policy which is significantly removed from the proportion of one-beds previously delivered within the Borough.”

In plain English: we know we’re building the wrong homes, but we’re doing it anyway because that’s what the market delivers.

The consequence is a near-permanent mismatch. At least 1,213 families currently in temporary accommodation need three bedrooms or more. Wandsworth completed 13 social rent homes of three bedrooms or larger in the whole of 2024/25.

What the Conservatives built

The pipeline of smaller units was established under the Conservative administration that ran Wandsworth for 44 years before Labour took over in 2022. The council’s own scrutiny records show that in the five years before Labour took control, Wandsworth averaged around 30% affordable housing delivery, below even the 35% London Plan standard. Officers acknowledged at the June 2025 housing scrutiny committee that schemes currently in the pipeline were “originally designed for sale” under the previous administration and converted to council use rather than redesigned for the housing need that actually exists.

The Right to Buy policy, operated nationally, gave many families a leg-up, providing them with property and a foothold toward generational wealth. It also reduced Wandsworth’s council stock significantly for people who still needed it. The homes were bought at good prices and in many cases later sold. Those homes were disproportionately larger family properties: the ones that are now most scarce.

What Labour then did

Labour came to power in 2022 with a manifesto commitment to push the affordable housing threshold to 50%. The intention was sound: force developers to provide more affordable homes to fill the gap.

But policy exists within a wider world. It was already difficult for developers to make a profit with the 35% threshold; when extra regulations came in and constructions costs jumped, it became impossible. A threshold that developers cannot viably meet does not produce more affordable homes. It produces fewer, because developers submit viability assessments claiming they can only afford 20% or 25%. Or they don’t build at all. In Putney last year, the number of new builds was literally zero.

It’s not just Wandsworth. Across London, housing starts have fallen to their lowest level since records began nearly 40 years ago, with construction started on just 100 council-funded homes across the entire capital in 2024/25. A new Building Safety Regulator, introduced after the Grenfell Tower fire, approves only a third of cases and takes an average of eight months to do so, adding financing costs that in some cases expand overall project costs by more than 15%. Across London, 281,000 homes have planning approval but are not being built because the economics no longer work. As things stand, major housebuilders have stopped buying land and have slowed construction in response to fears of stagflation and rising mortgages.

None of this is Wandsworth’s fault but it is the environment in which Wandsworth’s housing policy operates, and it makes every aspect of the bedroom mix problem harder to resolve.

As London mayor Sadiq Khan was being unhappily dragged to the conclusion that he needed to lower the affordable threshold to 20% to get any buildings built, Wandsworth was going the complete opposite direction.

Cabinet Member for Housing Cllr Aydin Dikerdem lowered the threshold to 45%, a retreat from the manifesto promise of 50%, but it was so high that developers gave up on Wandsworth altogether. The administration’s response was to decide to build homes itself. A plan to produce 1,000 new homes has created only a fraction of that: between 90 and 366 depending on how you want to define it.

Having convinced itself that developers were pulling a fast one, the current Labour administration has borrowed money to build homes itself – and discovered in the case of the Platt Estate near the river in Putney that it has paid more to build a new home (£489,000) than it would have cost to buy one on the open market (£385k–£470k).

The 45% threshold put in place was challenged by the London authorities and after months of filings and hearings, the housing inspector threw it out, concluding it was “not justified and would be counterproductive, materially impacting on the delivery of much needed homes.” He ordered 21 mandatory modifications to Wandsworth’s housing plan.

The net result of nearly four years of work was an affordable housing threshold of 35% – the exact same figure as when the council change hands in 2022 – but with it had come the death of construction in Putney. The policies pursued have been, by every measure, a disaster. Meanwhile the number of residents looking for housing has continued to grow, costing taxpayers millions.

Incredibly, when housing cabinet member Cllr Dikerdem reported the inspector’s decision to Cabinet, he called it “very, very good news” and claimed the 45% threshold was “the only thing we didn’t get.” We covered this Alice-in-Wonderland behaviour by simply running a table showing what the inspector said alongside what Dikerdem told the Cabinet.

Wandsworth’s housing chief delivered nothing then told Cabinet it was a win

To manage the queue with the stock that exists, the council runs a programme making offers to under-occupying tenants to move to smaller homes, freeing up larger properties for families. Of 200 offers made in 2024, 89 led to successful moves.

It is a drop in the bucket and officers are put into the position of defending a programme whose own results are acknowledged as insufficient. The council is managing a crisis it cannot resolve with the tools it has, using policy levers that its own records say aren’t delivering, in a system that both main parties helped to create.

What neither party is saying

We have had three hustings in Putney in the past week. And at none of them has a political party addressed the mechanism producing the shortage.

None have offered a specific, testable commitment on bedroom mix. None have acknowledged that the planning policy incentive (which rewards developers for building small) exists regardless of which party holds power.

The queue is over two years. The bill is £28.6 million and rising. The homes being built are the wrong size. Both main parties know this. Neither said so.

Between them, the two main parties’ housing manifestos run to thousands of words. Despite having failed to get anywhere near its 1,000 home target, Labour has pledged to build 1,000 more as well as make good on the ones it failed to build in the past four years. There is a good Jewish word for this: chutzpah.

The Conservatives pledge “an appropriate housing mix” without specifying how many of those homes will have three bedrooms or more. Neither party mentions the 1,213 families currently in temporary accommodation who need exactly that. Neither acknowledges that every month those families wait costs council taxpayers up to £2,226 – because the homes they need are not being built.

In 2022, Labour’s manifesto called children in temporary accommodation “a scandal” and pledged to reduce the number. The 2026 manifesto does not mention temporary accommodation at all. The Conservatives cite the £28.6 million bill directly: as an attack on Labour’s record, not as a problem they have costed a solution to. The crisis has a price. Neither party is honest about what fixing it would take.

As for the other parties? The Green’s East Putney candidate acknowledged the temporary accommodation figures – Wandsworth joint third worst in London, with 4,000 children affected, and an average stay three and a half years – but offered no solution. And the Lib Dems? They didn’t even mention it.