Right To Buy ‘Devastating’ Social Housing Stock, New Figures Reveal

Council homes are being sold off almost three times faster than local authorities can replace them. Freedom of Information requests to 72 councils found more than 12,000 council houses have been sold off since 2014, to a cost of over £930m, while only 4,309 were built over the same time period. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron — whose party issued the FoI requests — said  ‘The Government talked a lot about replacing council housing one for one but this has been shown to be utter fantasy.’ A spokesman from the CLG denied the Government promised to replace every Right to Buy sale. They said it was ‘only additional sales’ above the original forecasted baseline that should be replaced one for one, adding it was up to councils to use the receipts from Right to Buy sales for new homes. Download the latest RTB figures from the Gov.UK website.