Ealing council are like that, I was on the housing list, got told several times you might as well give up because you are D class. in Ealing you get booted off the books every 12 months and have to reapply as well.
We (me, DF and son) live in a nice one bed place above a row of shops, rented out for £150 more a month then we paid at the last place, from a large property management company that owns the shops.
When we applied to the council list, I was pregnant and we lived in a crappy little "studio flat" just a single room in a Victorian house with a shower head and toilet in a cupboard sized room and very small kitchen in a corner with a little mini oven on a cupboard, we had water come in the ceiling everytime someone upstairs had a shower, we regularly had no heating over the winter because the boiler simply was not large enough to deal with the size of the place, we had mice, bed bugs, carpet beetles, shit electrics/wiring on the fire alarm system and lights and no lock on the main front door because someone (who lived there) nicked it in the middle of the night once and the locks on each flat door where the kind of crappy ones you get on patio doors, someone died there too, leaned on the 2nd floor banisters and went thru them because they where rotten.
Still we with a baby on the way where low priority and the funny thing was half the people in there where put there by the council as temporary accommodation while they waited for a council place, the council must have known that the Fire Brigade had threated to fine the landlord over the fire alarm system and the council inspectors couldn't care less about the bugs/mice, water and crap wiring, in fact the only thing they ever moaned at the Landlord about was the rats living outside under the front step and that was only because they where making holes in the ground that people could trip over, absolute joke.