Right to Buy Stats

Right to Buy has helped millions achieve home ownership and that shouldn't be overlooked. The bigger question is whether we're replacing those homes quickly enough. Every property sold reduces the pool of affordable housing unless it's replaced, so success shouldn't just be measured by how many tenants buy their home, but by whether councils can maintain the overall supply for future generations.

Right to Buy has been brilliant at creating individual homeowners, but terrible at replacing the social homes it removes. The 90% surge is likely the aftershock of tenants racing to secure the previous, more generous discounts before they were cut.

The real scandal is the replacement gap. Even allowing for timing differences, 14,275 sales against only 3,452 replacement homes funded is nowhere close to a sustainable cycle. Every home sold without an effective replacement shrinks the safety net for the next family and pushes more households towards an already expensive private rental market.

The scheme should not be abolished, but every sale must genuinely fund a like-for-like replacement in the same area, with receipts released quickly and councils given the power to build. Homeownership cannot be expanded by quietly dismantling social housing. After more than two million sales, the question is no longer whether Right to Buy works for the buyer; it is whether it works for the country.

That massive surge in sales was just everyone scrambling before the government ruined the party by slashing right-to-buy discounts back to pre-2012 levels.

Sure, councils banked a neat pile of cash, but the replacement scheme remains a absolute masterclass in modern maths, while sales skyrocketed, new builds actually dropped. Replacing barely a fraction of what you sell, on top of the millions lost over the decades, is certainly one bold strategy for managing social housing!

Right to Buy is one of those policies that is impossible to argue against in principle and very difficult to defend in practice. The aspiration is legitimate, the popularity is genuine, and the long-term effect on social housing stock has been quietly catastrophic. Selling council homes to the people living in them sounds like common sense until you notice that the replacements never quite materialise, the waiting lists keep growing, and the homes that leave the public stock tend not to return. After forty-five years and two million sales, the scheme has done rather more for the property-owning democracy than it has for the people still waiting for a home.

Some of the discounts on right to buy are quite large. For example, someone trying to purchase a two-bedroom house they had been living in for ten years recently had a £126,000 discounted purchase price on a £445,000 property. Another one trying to buy a £430,000 property had a £136,000 discount. There are quite a few mortgage lenders accepting right to buy. They get applications from people buying homes of a wide range of values and locations. There is a real mixture of people trying to buy their council house; some of them have good incomes and partners they want to add to mortgage applications. Others are searching to see if they can afford to buy, even if they know their chances are limited.

https://neweconomics.org/2024/01/government-subsidising-private-landlords-70bn-over-next-five-years