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Right to Buy lessons must be learned

It is time for the government to look at the long-term impacts of the Right to Buy, writes Martin Hilditch

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Inside Housing research shows rise in RTB homes converted to PRS #ukhousing

Time for the government to examine RTB impacts says @martinhilditch #ukhousing

Back in September, communities secretary Sajid Javid touched on Right to Buy in his speech announcing the forthcoming Social Housing Green Paper.

Referring to it as “a great scheme”, Mr Javid said Right to Buy “helps people get on the housing ladder and, by releasing funds, it helps deliver the next generation of homes for affordable rent”.

Our front page story this week suggests there are other, less positive impacts, too.

Research obtained from 111 local authorities via Freedom of Information Act requests carried out by Inside Housing suggests that more than 40% of former council homes are now being let privately.


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Exclusive: 7% rise in former Right to Buy homes now rented privatelyExclusive: 7% rise in former Right to Buy homes now rented privately
Government within four homes of breaking Right to Buy pledgeGovernment within four homes of breaking Right to Buy pledge
Revealed: the scale of ex-RTB home conversions to private rentRevealed: the scale of ex-RTB home conversions to private rent

The councils had sold a total of 180,260 leasehold properties between them under the Right to Buy since 1980. Of these, 72,454 are now registered with an ‘away address’, indicating subletting.

“Right to Buy has caused a contraction in the amount of cheaper social housing.”

In itself this might not be a problem, if the social homes sold off were all replaced on a like-for-like basis – but as Inside Housing’s readers will know, this is far from the case.

This week’s figures suggest that not only has Right to Buy caused a contraction in the amount of cheaper social housing available – but that it is also being converted into its own higher-cost replacement in the private rented sector.

The news came as Welsh Assembly members approved a bill to abolish the Right to Buy in Wales this week. Rebecca Evans, housing and regeneration minister for the Welsh Government, said it would protect social housing stock so it was available “for those who need it most”.

Back in England, Mr Javid has promised a nationwide conversation on social housing. This conversation will look at “what works and doesn’t work, what has gone right and what has gone wrong”, and where things have gone wrong, “how to fix them”.

Right to Buy would certainly crop up in many housing professionals’ assessments of “what has gone wrong”. For policy that is getting on for 40 years old, it was informative to see how many council directors of housing that raised it as a major headache for them in a recent series of events with local authorities that Inside Housing has been holding.

Click here to read our exclusive research

For many of the reasons mentioned above, Mr Javid’s comprehensive conversation will be missing a trick if it doesn’t look at the role the Right to Buy has played in the current affordability crisis.

The government might be committed to the scheme ideologically – but that shouldn’t preclude it from analysing the impact and using that to better inform future housing policy.

With the government slowly moving ahead with its plans to extend the Right to Buy to housing associations, the time is right to look more seriously at the long-term impacts of doing so and learn from errors that may have been made in the past.

Martin Hilditch, deputy editor, Inside Housing

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