Council 'sleepwalking into a housing timebomb'

Kensington and Chelsea is the least affordable borough in the capital to buy property, with the average house price standing at 18.6 times the average salary, and, if current trends continue, some people will be on the social housing waiting list for more than 11 years.

London Assembly Green party member Jenny Jones said: "We need more radical policies to provide homes for Londoners, not cuts and false promises."

Julia Craig has been living in temporary accommodation in North Kensington with her four-year-old daughter for more than two years. She said: "It's unacceptable. They treat us like dirt, move us from place to place, with every flat worse than the previous one.

"They talk about housing people who need it most - what more do they want than a single mum with a young kid?"

A council spokesman said the length of time applicants would have to wait depends on their circumstances but admitted it was impossible to house everyone in the borough.

He said: "There is great pressure on the availability of affordable housing in the borough. It is a popular place to live and we will never have enough homes for all the people who would like to live here.

"We don't really ever expect to be in a position where the housing list will have been cleared because as we house people, others will be joining it."

In a report entitled Coming Home to Roost released last week, Jenny Jones also criticised Mayor of London Boris Johnson for his lack of action to tackle the housing crisis.

She said: "Instead of making the scale of the crisis clear, the Mayor keeps re-announcing slipped targets that wouldn't even solve these problems. While he pops up in boroughs taking credit for recently built homes, the cost of getting a home is spiralling even further away from the average Londoner."

A spokeswoman for the Mayor said: "The Mayor has wide support across the industry for his plans to deliver the largest number of affordable homes in a single Mayoral term. He has already overseen the funding of over 20,000 more affordable homes since he was elected despite facing some of the most severe economic conditions seen in the last century."