Ealing Council's decision to house a family in a million-pound home costing taxpayers £12,000 a month caused a national outcry last week.

Meanwhile while a new report reveals that 94 per cent of people on the borough's waiting last have almost no chance of getting a home.

DAN HODGES and JAMES GATES take a look at Ealing's ongoing housing fiasco

IF the controversy over the seven-bedroom house handed over to the Saindi family was not evidence enough of Ealing's

chronic housing shortage, figures revealed in a report this week speak for themselves.

By Ealing Council's own reckoning, at least nine out of 10 names on the 20,000-strong waiting list have "virtually no chance" of getting their hands on a flat with two or more bedrooms.

And with around 7,000 bids every fortnight for the 20 or 30 homes that become available in the same period, there is clearly now a massive housing shortfall which needs to be addressed.

The council's justification for moving Mrs Saindi and her six children into a £1.2m private rented house in Acton - at a cost to the taxpayer of £12,000 a month - is that it had to follow rules and agree to rents which have been set nationally.

Eldest son Jawad Saindi branded Ealing "dumb" for taking the unusual step. His life now, he said, was like 'winning the lottery".

But critics say it is all too easy for the council to get people off its waiting list by pushing them into private sector accommodation which is then paid for by central Government.

In the meantime, thousands are left waiting with little hope, locked in a system which the local authority acknowledges is confusing, frustrating and misleading, and with little prospect of more homes being built or refurbished.

Plans to make the housing allocation system simpler and fairer were revealed in a report to cabinet this week which said the existing four-band scheme is "complicated and difficult to explain."

Only those lucky enough to be classified as band A have a realistic chance of rehousing, it said, with thousands of others in the three lower bands left with "unrealistic expectations".

It also revealed that despite the chronic lack of housing, there are more than 500 "under-occupied" families on the council's books who have too much space and want to move into smaller accommodation.

Persuading them to move could unlock many more of the type of large flats which are in very high demand.

Regardless of the changes to the fine print, however, critics believe the real problems stem from years of unwillingness on the part of the council to improve and expand its housing stock.

Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush MP Andy Slaughter said: "They can tinker with the system all they like, it's a question of supply and demand.

"The system is a huge con. "People who are on band D are effectively not on any list at all.

"At the end of the day there are not enough properties, which is due to a combination of disposals, right-to-buy and failure to build, which has been a problem in Ealing for as long as I can remember.

"If you look at somewhere like the South Acton Estate, where the development has been stalled for 10 years, they're decanting people, leaving buildings half empty and not building any new stock."

And he current problems would be exacerbated by the "shambolic" war between Ealing Council and Ealing Homes, which has effectively frozen £50m of cash set aside for home improvements while the council investigates allegations of improperly awarded renovation contracts.

"Ealing Council is letting down thousands of tenants and people with housing need who they have a statutory duty to help," said Mr Slaughter.

"They are either incapable of doing so or they just don't care."

Building thousands of new council houses was impossible, said council leader Jason Stacey, but a number of things were being done to ease the pressure on the waiting list.

"The changes to the application process are an attempt to clear up some of the anomalies and confusion and to have a bit more honesty and transparency.

"We are always going to have more demand than supply. We have a particular issue with two bedroom properties and above where we've got families waiting to be housed.

"I take the view that it's better for us to say that for some people, they're never going to be housed by the council. We need to look at other options for people, such as getting more shared ownership schemes going and more low cost to buy properties."

The council's new 'golden transfer' system would encourage more under-occupiers to leave larger homes to make way for families.

"It's about using what we've got, trying to get as much more as we can in terms of social housing," said Cllr Stacey, "but also about having an honesty in our policy about who is going to get in and who isn't."

A report into the controversy over the housing of the Saindi family will go to council next week.