Cable: Lib Dems would allow councils to suspend the right to buy

Speaking in support of a motion setting out his party’s plan to build 300,000 homes, he said the right to buy had done ‘enormous damage and we have to stop it’.

The motion also called for a national review of the policy, through which thousands of council homes have been sold since the discounts available to tenants were increased by the coalition government in 2012. 

Mr Cable told delegates: ‘I fully support what [other members] have said about the lack of social housing. This is the crux of the problem. The right to buy policy without replacement has done enormous damage and we have to stop it.’

The business secretary also attacked the chancellor George Osborne’s Help to Buy mortgage scheme, saying it had sent house prices spiralling.

He said the policy ‘doesn’t actually help you to buy because it drives up the price and makes it less affordable. What we really need is help to build.’

This follows this morning’s reports party leader Nick Clegg is backing plans for five new garden cities between Oxford and Cambridge. It also comes as the party makes a concerted effort to distance itself from the Tory’s on housing policy. 

Mr Cable told fellow delegates the housing crisis was ‘fundamental’. ‘Large numbers of people are really suffering,’ he told the conference. ‘And we are creating enormous inequalities through the property market - inequalities between social classes and between generations.’

The motion also called for:

• the creation of a housing investment bank
• government investment in a ‘new generation’ of homes for low- and middle-income earners, such as through shared ownership and rent-to-buy
• a focus on developing off-site methods of construction
• a large-scale apprenticeships programme to support the party’s pledge to build 3 million homes in 10 years
• a plan for New Home Zones for local authorities, to allow them to build ‘good quality, affordable homes in communities with the infrastructure and green spaces which people value’.

Party president Tim Farron drew up and introduced the motion, which also set out plans for housing associations to be given greater flexibility over rent, control over how their stock is valued for borrowing purposes and local authorities to be given the right to acquire land for new garden cities and villages. 

The Liberal Democrats are the only major party to give grass roots members the opportunity to vote and amend policy at their annual conference, with Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge, adding the amendment on right to buy late in the day.