Years on the list and nowhere to go for mum and her eight children1

A mother raising eight children in a three-bedroom house in Cardiff is emblematic of the mounting strain on the city’s social housing system, with her story brought to light by city councillor Lynda Thorne in a recent council scrutiny committee meeting.
Cllr Thorne described the mother as “at the end of her tether,” highlighting that she is just one among many large families enduring long waits for suitable council housing, a situation that has become a significant challenge for Cardiff Council.
One council official told the committee she doesn’t think Cardiff will ever be able to fully meet the demand for social housing—a need that continues to rise each year as the number of applicants on the waiting list reached 9,682 by early April 2025, up 24% from November 2021.
Figures released by the council reveal that 6% of current applicants have been waiting for more than a decade, with Cllr Thorne sharing the story of a woman who has spent nearly 20 years on the list, unable to be rehoused due to a lack of sufficiently large properties.
“She has eight children,” Cllr Thorne told the committee.
“She has been on the waiting list for about 20 years but of course we won’t… rehouse anybody and overcrowd them, so she is in a three-bed property and we don’t have a large enough property to house them in.
I have to say… she was just at the end of her tether.” The council’s data also shows that 20% of applicants have been waiting two to four years, and 10% have been waiting four to six years, while many families are forced to remain in overcrowded conditions.
Cllr Thorne noted that one of the mother’s children has become a junior doctor and two others are studying medicine, yet even as the children grow up, they cannot afford to move out due to the lack of affordable housing options, a reality that she described as “heart wrenching.” “You can see now these children… they are grown up, but of course they can’t afford to move out because they can’t afford to get anywhere and so it is heart wrenching and you can’t blame anybody, but I guess she is one of those ones.
She has been on the waiting list for over 10 years.
The family is growing up and it is very hard to know what to do about those cases.” The housing waiting list in Cardiff is subdivided into categories based on need, with 91 applicants in the ‘immediate needs’ list, 997 in the homeless list, and 8,310 on the general waiting list, which includes those who are overcrowded or have medical or mobility issues.
Cardiff Council has announced plans to expand the scale and pace of its council house building programme, including a new partnership with Vale of Glamorgan Council and Lovell Partnerships to deliver at least 2,260 new homes over the next decade.
Despite these efforts, allocation and rehousing manager Katie McAndrew told the committee, “Whilst there is a good supply of housing… it’s just absolutely not enough to meet demand and so there are lots of challenges that we need to address… to try and increase the availability of social housing to try and meet that demand.
Although, honestly, I don’t think we ever will be able to will we?” The total number of lets made via the Cardiff housing waiting list between April 2024 and February 2025 was 1,461, and while properties available to let have increased by 17% compared to the previous year, the gap between those waiting and those housed remains wide.
The council has also taken steps to help more people downsize by offering accommodation to older residents in community living scheme properties, freeing up more homes for families.
In a statement published in March 2025, the council reported delivering 1,819 new homes of all tenures as part of its housebuilding programme, including 1,461 council homes and 358 homes for sale, with a further 422 homes under construction and hundreds more in the pipeline.
Nationally, the UK faces a chronic shortage of social housing, with Shelter estimating that 1.2 million households are on waiting lists across England and Wales, and the Local Government Association calling for urgent government investment to address the crisis and prevent more families from being trapped in unsuitable, overcrowded accommodation.