Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what estimate the Government has made of the number of people with mental health problems on social housing waiting lists.

Local authorities are required by law to ensure that ‘reasonable preference’ (priority) for social housing is given to those who need to move on medical and welfare grounds, including grounds relating to a disability. Statutory guidance issued to councils in 2012 includes ‘a mental illness or disorder’ as one of the indicators of the medical and welfare reasonable preference category

The annual Local Authority Housing Statistical return collects data on households on the waiting list for each of the reasonable preference criteria: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/local-authority-housing-statistics-data-returns-for-2016-to-2017

In 2016/17, there were 108,858 households that met medical and welfare reasonable preference criteria.