Two flats at 179 Barry Road and three in Camberwell go to auction. The council says they are uneconomic to repair, with 22,000 on its housing register.

Southwark Council is selling five of its own empty flats at auction, and two of them are on Barry Road in East Dulwich.

The decisions were taken by the Strategic Director of Resources on 11 September and published on 14 September. They authorise the sale of 179 Barry Road, SE22 0JP and 39 Wilson Road, SE5 8PE at auction, or by private treaty if an auction does not work. The call-in deadline passes today, 21 September, with no call-in lodged, and the decisions take effect tomorrow.

Both buildings are held in the council’s Housing Revenue Account, the ring-fenced account that runs its council housing. Both have been declared voids. The council uses the same sentence about each one: the property is “not fit for purpose and uneconomic to be brought back into use as an affordable home”.

What is being sold

Address Ward Building Flats Status
179 Barry Road, SE22 0JP Dulwich Hill Victorian two storey mid terrace 179a and 179b Both vacant
39 Wilson Road, SE5 8PE St Giles Victorian three storey mid terrace 39a, 39b and 39c All vacant

The two reports are near identical. Each says the property “currently exhibits structural issues and extensive disrepair” and that “substantial investment is needed to bring it up to an acceptable and safe standard”.

A third property was approved for disposal on the same day, 41 Scovell Crescent, SE1 1PS in Borough and Bankside. That one is a different kind of case, a shared ownership flat sold under right to buy in 1994 with a council mortgage, and it is not part of the void programme.

Why the council says it sells rather than repairs

The Barry Road report sets out the case in one paragraph, and it is the clearest statement of the policy we have seen from Southwark. Properties picked for disposal, it says, are generally in poor condition and a financial burden on the Housing Revenue Account. It then lists what tends to be wrong with them:

  • inherent long-term defects that are not cost effective to maintain
  • a tendency to become complex complaints and legal disrepair claims, “expensive to settle and resource intensive to manage”
  • poor insulation and energy efficiency, and a tendency to damp
  • poor internal layouts
  • fire safety concerns, specifically “compartmentation breaches”, the failures in walls and floors that let fire spread between flats

The money does not leave housing. Net receipts are ring-fenced for the Housing Revenue Account and go to the council’s Housing Investment Programme, which includes building new homes for rent.

The sales follow a void disposal policy agreed by the then Cabinet in December 2020. Authority to sell sits with the Assistant Director of Property wherever the price is below £3 million, a threshold the Cabinet raised from £750,000 on 6 February 2024. The auctioneers’ informal estimate puts both properties comfortably inside it.

Five empty council flats going to auction, against the size of Southwark's housing register Bar chart. Southwark's housing register holds more than 22,000 households, of which 4,200 are in temporary accommodation. The council let 1,217 social rented homes to register households in 2024 to 2025, down from 2,442 in 2013. Five flats in two Victorian terraces, two at 179 Barry Road in East Dulwich and three at 39 Wilson Road in Camberwell, are being sold at auction. Five flats out, 22,000 households waiting Southwark Council housing register and annual social rented lets, against the void flats approved for auction on 11 September 2026. Households on the housing register 22,000+ of those, in temporary accommodation 4,200 Social rented lets in 2013 2,442 Social rented lets in 2024/25 1,217 Void flats going to auction 5 Sources: Southwark Council disposal reports, 11 Sep 2026; Housing Allocations Scheme Review, Sep 2026. Graphic by Dulwich Today
Bars are to scale against the register figure. The five flats are a rounding error next to the waiting list, which is the council's point as much as its critics'.

The numbers around it

Southwark’s own housing papers, published for the Executive meeting on 15 September, put more than 22,000 households on the borough’s housing register, 4,200 of them in temporary accommodation. The supply to let them into has roughly halved in a decade: 2,442 social rented lets in 2013, against 1,217 in 2024/25. We covered that report when it was published, in Southwark Housing Register: 22,000 get a new band.

Five flats will not shift those figures either way. The question the reports do not answer is how much it would have cost to repair these five, because no repair estimate appears in either document. The reports give the auctioneers’ view of what the buildings are worth, not what it would take to fix them.

What happens at the auction

  • A guide price is set with the auctioneer for marketing.
  • A reserve price is set “just prior to auction”, using market intelligence, so the property is not undersold.
  • If a property attracts no bid, or no bid above the reserve, the council can enter it in a later auction after reviewing the reserve, or sell it through an estate agent at or above the reserve.
  • No auction date is named in either report.

What it means for you

If you live on Barry Road or Wilson Road, the two buildings stay empty until they sell, and the buyer is very likely to be a private one. Neither report puts any condition on who can buy, or on what the flats are used for afterwards. Southwark’s Victorian terraces around Barry Road are almost all in the East Dulwich controlled parking zone, which runs 8.30am to 6.30pm on weekdays, so a refurbishment will bring skips and permits with it.

If you are on the housing register, nothing here changes your banding. The new allocations scheme, not these sales, is what moves people between bands.

If you want to object, the moment has passed for these two. Delegated decisions in Southwark can be called in by councillors for a set number of days after publication, and the deadline for Barry Road and Wilson Road is today, 21 September, with the count standing at zero. The decisions take effect on 22 September.

If you want to watch for the next ones, they appear as decisions of the Strategic Director of Resources on the council’s delegated decisions list, usually titled with nothing but a street name and a postcode. That is how these three were published.

Sources