ROOF Blog

Thirty years ago this month – on 20 December 2023 – the new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher published its housing bill, changing the social face of Britain with one of the most popular political promises in history: the Right to Buy.

Today the repercussions are still being felt. This year the number of council houses sold off passed the two million mark; so too did the numbers of people across Britain on waiting lists for a council house, up almost 10 per cent in a year.

Some inner-city areas would need decades to clear their backlog.

With house building all but stopped in a recession that has seen repossessions and unemployment rise, there is a crisis in Britain’s homes, and the finger of blame is pointed firmly at that ‘social revolution’ of 1979.

The number of council and housing association homes for rent is at its lowest in 50 years, a Shelter Scotland report has found. Building pressure warns of a ‘growing chasm between the number of homes needed and the number available’. It estimated there were 142,000 households on the waiting list for council homes, and said the right-to-buy scheme was partly to blame for the shortage as more than 135,000 homes had been sold under the scheme in the previous decade.

For the first time in nearly 20 years English local councils are to begin constructing homes, following last week’s announcement by John Healey allowing town halls to retain rent from council housing and receipts from the right-to-buy scheme. Analysts predict that nearly 140,000 homes will be built in the next decade, as local authorities start applying for £350 million in direct funding made available from the government. Birmingham is planning to build 500 council houses a year within three years to become the biggest council house builder in England.

Across England the average discount on a local authority home has fallen from 27 per cent in 1997/98 to 11 per cent in 2007/08, junior housing minister Iain Wright said in response to parliamentary questions. The trend was most dramatic in London, where the average discount was worth 53 per cent of an average right-to-buy property 11 years ago, but worth just 13 per cent now, while in other regions the proportion fell from a half to a quarter.

The law has been changed so that no more tolerated trespassers can be created and all existing tolerated trespassers will be given a new tenancy. Before the amendments to the Housing and Regeneration Act and the successor landlord order came into force yesterday thousands of council tenants had lost their housing rights, even if they complied with any conditions imposed by the courts. Though they continued living in their property they could not require their landlord to carry out repairs, exercise their right to buy, or ensure a spouse or family member could succeed to the tenancy if they died.

The right to buy for newly built affordable homes in Scotland will be abolished by the Scottish government. Under a draft housing Bill, the government is also consulting on a proposal to block tenants moving into existing affordable homes from exercising the right to buy. This move could mean 18,000 homes were kept for affordable rents for the coming decade. Shelter Scotland has welcomed the move, calling it the ‘death knell’ of an outdated policy.

Councils across England are facing a huge drop in cash as right-to-buy sales fail. A snapshot across 10 councils has revealed that receipts from right to buy fell 89 per cent in the last year, from 380 homes in the third quarter of 07/08 to 40 for the same period in 08/09. The implication for councils is a ‘significant’ drop in income as less right to buy numbers means less money to maintain the housing stock – and more properties to maintain.

The Office of Fair Trading has criticised three ex-directors of Fasttrack for misleading council tenants in a right to buy scheme. The directors persuaded tenants to make right to buy applications and, as part of the deal, the buyers were required to sign up to a credit agreement with finance provider FAI. The OFT found that Fasttrack misled the buyers about the costs of signing up.

The National Housing Federation (NHF) has called for a temporary ban on tenants buying social housing to help stop the slump in affordable housing stock. The NHF said that twice as many affordable homes had been sold off than had been built in England between 1999 and 2007, and added that affordable stock had fallen by an ‘unsustainable’ 300,000. Since 1999 the number of social houses fell from 4.3 million to 3.9 million, while the number of households on waiting lists had risen by 61 per cent to 1.61 million. A spokesperson for NHF said that one in 13 of every household in the country is on a waiting list for an affordable rented house, and this is likely to increase to one in ten. The government said it disagreed with the proposal as right to buy had helped thousands of households own their own homes.