Lambeth Council's decision to recall and sell 'short life' cooperative housing is still proving controversial, with the issue brought up at a disability hustings.

Answering a question about estate regeneration and affordable and accessible housing, Councillor Jackie Meldrum, cabinet member for adult social care, said estate regeneration was the most contentious issue of the election.

With 22,000 people on the council's housing list, affordable housing was an issue across the country, she said.

She said: "It's a big issue for London and south west and for an awful lot of the country, and it needs a lot of support from government."

But Green Party candidate for Lambeth and Southwark Jonathan Bartley said the council played a larger role in the housing crisis in the borough.

He said the crisis was exacerbated by the council's recall of short life housing, which has seen evictions for co-op tenants in order to sell their homes for profit.

He said: "The council made £76 million by destroying housing coops, and selling short life housing off to developers, and then taking those people and putting them to the top of the council housing list so people at the bottom had to wait even longer, and not one penny of that went towards building new social housing. This is an absolute scandal. It is not good enough to blame central government. The blame fails fairly and squarely on Lambeth."

Many of the co-op communities were established as a solution for long housing waiting list and run-down properties in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

An FOI made to the council revealed they had made £71,251,000 between 2010 and 2016 from the sales.

The proceeds went into a single capital fund and were not linked to specific developments, according to the FOI.