RE: Sorry, the system's broken!

There's a couple of different factors:

There is a housing crisis and not enough homes (and possibly the right kind of homes) for everyone who needs or wants one. The population has steadily grown, demographics and housing preferences have changed, notably the dramatic increase in single-person households - something like 40%? And at least one generation has been priced out of the market.

For social housing, a contributing factor was the Right to Buy scheme where tenants had the right to buy their property. However, councils were not allowed to keep the receipts and replace social housing that went out of the supply. Some research recently found that the majority of social housing properties that were sold to tenants have now come into the hands of private landlords. So a plan that could have been argued, and has, was about the distribution of wealth more equally by offering people the opportunity to buy their own homes has, over time, simply become the privatisation of public resources and the transfer of wealth to already wealthier people.

Housing lists in London boroughs can often have four times the number of households waiting for a home than they have properties in total. I'm aware of places in both London and Leicester where there are multiple generations living in one and two bedroomed housing both social and privately owned. A friend of mine lived in a hostel for fourteen years in Kensington and Chelsea (the richest borough in England) before he was offered a home. Private rentals are extortionate and often have poor conditions. London boroughs, between them, spend £4.0 million a day on temporary accommodation, mainly to private landlords.

Since 2010, council budgets have been reduced by 60% and there simply isn't enough funding to fulfill their statutory duties. I imagine that housing officers are under intense pressure and it must be very dispiriting for them how little they can do.

The Labour Party Policy has quite a bit about housing and their plans to build 1.5 million houses over the next Parliament in their manifesto. I can't get you to the exact section but the link will take you to the relevant chapter and you can scroll down a couple of sections to the housing bit under Get Britain Building Again.

There are community housing schemes around the country, there's at least one in Leicester where housing was built on unused wasteland next to the railway line (there is a lot of unused land owned by transport authorities). Where I work, we have a collaboration funded by the Lloyds Foundation to look at a) getting more money into housing services and b) looking at alternative housing solutions. The collaboration is between expert organisations that provide services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence and, initially, five local authorities. Completely coincidentally, a friend phoned me on Tuesday with a contact in the construction industry who wants to do some charity work with women and children. That was really good news!