Hi, we’re currently three people in an overcrowded, two bedroom flat in North West London owned by a housing association (one parent, one adult child, one minor child, each with some sort of disability/special needs). We’ve been allocated Band B for Locata due to urgent medical need to move.
When we moved here in 2016 my minor child wasn’t born yet and my adult child was a minor - we had been in temporary accommodation for over 10 years prior and were keen to secure a property so we were not transient. At the time, the rent was £242 per week - it’s currently £316.
We live on a close and there’s an identical block of flats 50-100m from us with a different housing association and the rent is £140 per week. There are also several other properties owned by our same housing association in similar locations with the same or more bedrooms and we are yet to encounter a rent as high as ours.
This is obviously impeding our ability to swap our property with a more suitable one due to the large disparity in rent, and several people have let us know that they’d be interested in swapping with us but can’t due to the rent price.
Can anyone offer any insight if there is anything we as residents can do about this? Is it legal/lawful for our housing association to have equivalent or larger properties with such a vast price difference in the same area and is there anything we can do to contest this?
Any advice would be appreciated, many thanks!