Council housing in England is supposed to be for people who genuinely need it.
It exists for people on low incomes, people fleeing difficult situations, families with nowhere to go. Sadly, a growing number of people are abusing the system, and it’s costing the country around £2 billion every year while thousands of families sit on waiting lists that stretch for decades.
The problem has a name: tenancy fraud. It covers everything from simply walking away from a council property without telling anyone, to subletting it to other people and pocketing the difference in rent. In the worst cases, people have turned council homes into cannabis farms or rented them out on Airbnb while living abroad.
The Tenancy Fraud Forum, a group of experts who study this issue, estimates that between 3% and 5% of all social housing in England is being misused in some way, with around 50,000 affected homes in London alone.
There’s a dedicated team trying to catch them out.
In Smethwick, near Birmingham, a small team from Sandwell Council spends its days tracking down fraud cases. Led by a man named Ollie Knight, the unit drives out to suspected properties, knocks on doors, talks to neighbours, and cross-references data like electricity usage and whether credit cards are registered at an address. They dress casually rather than looking like police because the goal is to get people talking rather than shutting down.
Needless to say, it can be dangerous work. One investigator was threatened with a screwdriver by a tenant who was hearing voices, and the team has discussed wearing stab vests on visits, as discussed in an investigative feature by The Telegraph.
In the most recent financial year, the Sandwell team recovered 42 council properties and stopped 41 more from being handed over to people making fraudulent applications. They’ve seen enough to be permanently suspicious. One of the investigators, Craig, says his faith in people took a serious knock when he worked on a case involving a man who claimed to be homeless and then reapplied for a bigger property, saying he had a wife and a child receiving leukaemia treatment. Neither the wife nor the child existed. The man had forged a hospital letter to make the story more convincing, and the council had been rushing to help him.
What is subletting, and why do people do it?
The most common type of fraud the team encounters is subletting, where a council tenant rents out their home to someone else and charges them more than they’re paying the council. In Tipton, for example, a three-bedroom council house might cost a tenant around £500 a month in rent.
That same house on the open market would go for around £1,200, so a tenant can find a family willing to pay £800, pocket the £300 difference, and both parties feel they’re getting a decent deal while the council and the waiting list lose out completely.
One case Craig worked on involved a woman who was housed after telling the council she had suffered domestic violence. She was given a three-bedroom property but never actually moved in, continuing to live at her husband’s house while renting the council property to someone else for £1,000 a month for a year and a half.
She was also claiming housing benefit, which meant the council house was essentially free for her to profit from. When she was eventually caught and asked if she was sorry, her response was a fairly minimal yes. She was prosecuted, and the council clawed back what she’d made through an unlawful profit order.
One case in particular made national headlines.
The issue got a fresh burst of attention recently when Southwark Council in London announced it had taken back a council flat that had been allocated to a woman in 2007. That woman, Fatima Jabbe-Bio, is now the first lady of Sierra Leone and lives in a presidential palace. She had kept paying rent on the flat while her children lived there.
After a 12-month investigation, the council reclaimed the property. Jabbe-Bio said her children are British citizens and that she hadn’t done anything illegal, but the case highlighted just how long some misallocations can go on before anyone acts.
Westminster Council had a similar situation when it repossessed a flat on Berwick Street in Soho after discovering the tenant had moved to France and was renting the property out on Airbnb. That tenant was fined nearly £13,000.
Cases like these are at the more headline-grabbing end of the scale, but investigators say the everyday version of fraud, quiet subletting and quietly abandoned properties, is far more widespread and much harder to catch.
Fraud actually costs real people a lot.
The headline figure is around £2 billion a year across England, but the human cost is harder to put a number on. There are currently more than 1.3 million households on waiting lists for social housing in England. Research by Shelter found that at the current pace of building, it would take 119 years to clear those lists.
Every fraudulently held property is one fewer home available to someone who genuinely needs it, and in many cases those people end up in temporary accommodation, which is expensive for councils and deeply unstable for families.
The average cost of a single tenancy fraud case is estimated at around £42,000, rising to £66,000 in London once you factor in the knock-on costs. For years, some councils and housing associations didn’t take it seriously because the rent was still being paid and the problem felt invisible.
Paul Slowey, who runs a company called HTFi that investigates fraud on behalf of housing associations, says some organisations told him directly that if the rent was coming in, they didn’t care who was actually living there. That attitude, he says, has allowed the problem to get significantly worse.
Not every council is doing enough about it.
Sandwell is considered proactive by the standards of local councils, but that isn’t the norm. Slowey says illegal subletting is rife across England and the chance of getting caught remains fairly low in many areas. The cost of living has made it worse.
With private rents so high, the gap between what someone pays for a council home and what they can charge someone else has grown, making the financial incentive bigger than it’s ever been. Without consistent enforcement across all councils and housing associations, that gap is going to keep being exploited.
Back at the Sandwell office, Craig isn’t ready to write off the system entirely. He still believes social housing is a good idea and that most people on waiting lists genuinely need the help it provides. The problem, he says, is that a smaller number of people see it differently and treat it as an opportunity.
Catching them takes time, resources, and a willingness to take the issue seriously, and not every council has all three. With waiting lists growing and building slowing down, the stakes for getting this right have never been higher.
