Airbnb and local councils crack down on social home listings

Under the data-sharing programme, coordinated by the Public Sector Fraud Authority within the Cabinet Office, local authorities across London, as well as Edinburgh City Council, Birmingham City Council and Anglesey Council will work with Airbnb and listings confirmed as operating without permission will be removed.

David Harvey from Westminster City Council, said the authority believes about 3,000 of the borough’s 13,000 Airbnb listings are illegally sublet social homes.

He said all council tenancy and lease agreements prohibit short-term letting, and added that Westminster had 7,500 households on its waiting list for social housing.

“We want to free up those Airbnbs to be social homes again,” he said.

Harvey described the new data-sharing arrangement as “just the tip of the iceberg”, and housing officers had to “play detectives” by searching for lock boxes and speaking to neighbours to uncover suspected fraud.

More than 1.3 million households in England are currently on waiting lists for a social home, a rise of 10% in the past two years. Over 300,000 of those are in London.

The social housing action campaign said these homes “should be exclusively held for those in urgent need of housing, but the Cabinet Office’s focus on the tiny proportion that are rented out as short term lets is a calculated distraction.

“Even though this happens on such a negligible scale, it really makes very little impact on the acute housing crisis.”

Cabinet Office Minister Satvir Kaur said “This isn’t an either/or.

“One in 20 social homes potentially are being used fraudulently. It’s right and proper that we find those homes and use them for those who truly need them.”

She added: “£39 billion is also being invested into a new social and affordable homes programme, with an ambition to deliver around 300,000 new homes over the programme’s lifetime”.

The Cabinet Office and the Public Sector Fraud authority said the data-sharing initiative was expected “to return hundreds of properties to genuine families in its first year” as councils could confiscate illegally-let flats and reallocate to someone on the social housing waiting list.