Housing Bodies Welcome End Of Right To Buy In Scotland

The end of the Right to Buy scheme in Scotland after 30 years has been welcomed by housing bodies. Nearly 500,000 council and housing association homes were sold under the policy, which was introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1980. It allowed tenants in social housing to buy their homes at discounted rates. MSPs voted to scrap the measure in 2014 following concerns that it had contributed to an acute shortage of social housing. Right to Buy schemes are still operating in the rest of the UK. Read more on the BBC website.

You Can't Trust The Tories When It Comes To Affordable Housing

Britain's cost of housing crisis means that for too many families and young people on ordinary incomes, a decent and stable home is simply beyond their means. This isn't a natural disaster. Housing is, as the ex head of the civil service Lord Bob Kerslake has said, "the biggest public policy failure of the past 50 years".  Even under Margaret Thatcher, significant public funding was available for building affordable homes, and she re-affirmed the long-standing duty on private developers to do their bit to build low cost homes too. But this Conservative government has torn up the idea that we should build houses to cater for all needs, and with it any hope of solving the cost of housing crisis. Read more of this piece by John Healey on the Huffington Post website.

Right To Buy: A History Of Margaret Thatcher's Controversial Policy

From the moment of its introduction on 3 October 1980, right to buy has been a divisive and controversial policy. Supporters argue it gives the aspirational working class the opportunity to own their own home and improve their financial circumstances: opponents say it amounts to a sub-market flogging of public assets and has caused distorted house prices, substantially contributing to the housing crisis. Those against the policy spanned the political divide – with some Conservatives against the undervaluing and flogging of assets, finding themselves on the same side as Labour MPs defending state-owned housing. But the take up has been huge: since the introduction of right to buy more than 1.8m council homes have been sold at a discount. Read more on the Guardian website.

Why Thatcher's Home Ownership Dream Has Not Held Up

Three decades since Margaret Thatcher championed her vision of a society where three out of four families would own their own home, a report suggests private landlords have become more powerful than ever before. In 1985, 61pc of UK households were occupied by home owners. Thirty years on, that figure is the same at 61pc. Despite a surge in home ownership in the 1990s, the proportion of people owning their own properties has steadily declined since 2000. At the same time, the rental market has been turned on its head. The proportion of households renting from private landlords has doubled in thirty years. In 1985, 30pc of households rented from public landlords, and 9pc from private landlords. In 2015, 22pc of British adults are now renting from private landlords and just 9pc from public bodies. Read more on the Daily Telegraph website.

Council Houses Sold At 70% Under Their Market Value

Council houses have been sold off at valuations up to seven years out of date and at discounts bigger than those ever envisaged by Margaret Thatcher. Despite a deepening shortage of affordable housing, town halls have sold off more than 130,000 homes in the last decade at discounts of up to 70% of their market value. The price cuts have amounted to almost £4bn. Between 2012 and 2014, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets sold off more than 50 homes using valuations two or more years out of date, costing the public purse thousands of pounds on each transaction, according to data released under the Freedom of Information Act.  Including discount, the borough sold a one-bedroom flat for £42,000 when it was valued at £142,000. Read more on the Guardian website.

The Right to Buy: The Housing Crisis That Thatcher Built

In August 1980 Margaret Thatcher’s first government, barely a year old but already deeply unpopular and bogged down by problems, produced a Housing Act. Even more than most legislation it was prolix and repetitive, but its bold intention stood out: “to give ... the right to buy their homes ... to tenants of local authorities”. It envisaged a revolution in how a large minority of Britons lived. That revolution had been an awfully long time coming. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, cleverly sown by the Conservatives in 1980 and doggedly cultivated by rightwing Britain ever since, selling off council homes was not a sudden stroke of genius by the Thatcher government. The idea was as old as council housing itself.  This is an extract from Promised You A Miracle: UK80-82 by Andy Beckett, to be published by Penguin on 3 September. Read more on the Guardian website.

Landlords Cash In On Right-To-Buy – And Send Rents Soaring For Poorest Tenants

Private landlords have bought up half of the former council homes in some of London's poorest boroughs by exploiting Margaret Thatcher's celebrated right-to-buy scheme, an analysis reveals. Across the capital at least 36% - equivalent to 52,000 - one-time council homes are now rented out privately but that proportion is even higher in some of the poorest areas where average private-sector rents, often paid by tenants on housing benefit, cost as much as £230 a week more than council rents. A report to be published tomorrow claims that the right to buy scheme, highlighted by David Cameron as one of the greatest Thatcher successes at last year's Tory party conference, is "possibly unrivalled" in providing poor value for money to both taxpayers and local authorities. Read more on the Observer website.

More New Homes – But Not More Home Ownership

Ever since Margaret Thatcher gave council tenants the Right to Buy in 1980, it has become a deeply-held tenet in British politics that boosting home ownership is a good thing. Yet, after more than two decades of politicians encouraging Brits to take the plunge and invest in a roof of their own the result is a deeply divided society. But even aside from the gulf between the haves and the have-nots in our property-owning democracy, there is intriguing and alarming new evidence that, in economic terms, a high level of home ownership may not in itself be a good thing – indeed, quite the reverse.

A research paper based on data across US states over time finds that areas with higher home ownership tend to have higher unemployment. The effect is large: over time, a doubling of the rate of owner-occupation is eventually followed by more than a doubling of the unemployment rate – and similar results were found in a separate study on Finland. Read more on the Observer website.

Osborne under Pressure to Boost Housebuilding to Kickstart the Economy

George Osborne is under growing all-party pressure to boost housebuilding to kickstart the economy and create jobs after his March Budget was criticised as a missed opportunity to tackle the housing crisis.  The Chancellor is being urged to use his spending review in June to give the go-ahead to the building of up to 100,000 council and housing association homes to complement the help for home-buyers he announced in the Budget. Critics say he needs to increase the supply of homes as well as demand through the mortgage market. The pressure increased after new figures showed that 2m council houses and flats have been sold since Baroness Thatcher introduced her flagship “right to buy” policy in 1980 – the same number of people now on local authority waiting lists for housing.  Read more on the Independent website.

Thatcher's Legacy

Nearly 40 per cent of homes bought under the right to buy in one London borough are now owned by private landlords. The GMB has found 6,180 of 15,875 properties sold by Wandsworth Council under the right to buy are now rented out privately.  The union has also discovered 977 landlords own more than one of these properties, with one owning 93. Using Land Registry data it has identified several of these landlords, who it describes as a ‘millionaire elite’.  Paul Kenny, general secretary of the union, said: ‘It shows private businesses making vast profits from the public purse while the people these homes were built for sit on waiting lists that never move.’  Read more on the GMB website.