UK Housing Review: Right to Buy branded a ‘strategic failure’

The research also argued that the Right to Buy comes at a significant cost to the taxpayer via housing benefit due to the higher rents charged in the private sector. 

The shift to private housing has put pressure on local authority waiting lists, driving up temporary accommodation costs, it said.

Meanwhile, the report said the cash value of the average Right to Buy discount in 2019-20 of 43% indicated that some Right to Buy purchasers in England receive discounts that far exceed the amount of rent they paid on their property. 

“Right to buy has become a strategic failure in England and, unless reconsidered, the policy will continue to generate uneven spatial and social impacts, contributing to social disadvantage and exacerbating inequalities, the report concluded.

The report’s author, Alan Murie, emeritus professor of urban and regional studies at the University of Birmingham, said the problem “has not been right to buy as such”, but is the continuation of Right to Buy “alongside other policy failures”. 

“If there had been a sufficient attempt to sustain investment in social housing and to reinvest capital receipts in social rented homes, the impacts of right to buy could have been offset,” he said.

The research will be included in the CIH’s upcoming UK Housing Review for 2022. 

James Prestwich, director of policy and external affairs at the CIH, said: “This analysis shows that the Right to Buy is an ill-designed policy which undermines the availability of social housing stock for those who need it most and adds to pressure on the public purse. An urgent rethink is needed on its future.”