The Legacy of the 'Right to Buy' Plan

The introduction of "right to buy" for council tenants in 1980 was intended to make Britain "a nation of property owners". No government has done much to interfere in the course the property market has taken since. It's fair to say this policy can now be retrospectively analysed to get a fairly clear picture of what it has achieved. Not its actual aim, unfortunately.  But it can boast that it has made other changes. Rented council property is simultaneously more stigmatised and more in demand. Private rents are very high, and sometimes paid for under housing benefit, which is more expensive than the price of providing housing such as that which was sold off so cheaply. And a property market with such problems of supply and demand, that even the bursting of the biggest property-price bubble Britain has ever known, has not resulted in the painful deflation that would have to happen were Britain to get back on track to becoming "a nation of property owners." And Westminster council is putting up homeless families in £700-a-night hotels, because it has no alternative now that housing benefit is capped. Right to buy hasn't gone terribly well, I'd say.