Right To Buy 2: Robbing Peter To Pay Paul

The government’s ‘Right to Buy 2’ proposal is a complicated mongrel of a policy, combining two very different elements. The plan is to let tenants of housing associations buy their social homes, with the generous discounts of the Right to Buy, and to fund those discounts by forcing councils to sell their social homes on the open market. It’s not surprising that not many people outside the housing sector have fully got their heads around it yet. There’s a lot of confusion about which homes will be sold, who will end up owning them, what will get built, who will win and will lose. In short, the policy is a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s giving housing association tenants in one place a windfall discount of up to £104,000 off the price of buying their home, and paying for it by having a fire sale on council homes somewhere else. Read more on the Shelter blog.