Right to buy scheme

The Right to Buy scheme is a policy in the United Kingdom (since 1 August 2016 with the exception of Scotland) which gives secure tenants of councils and some housing associations the legal right to buy, at a large discount, the home they are living in. There is also a Right to Acquire for assured tenants of housing association homes built with public subsidy after 1997, at a smaller discount. About 1.5 million homes in the UK have been sold in this manner since 1980.

Supporters claim that the programme gave millions of households a tangible asset, secured their families finances and by releasing cash to repay Local Authority loans, and helped improve the public finances. Critics claim that this compounded a housing shortage for those of low income and initiated a national house price bubble and what is commonly recognised as the displacement and social cleansing of traditional communities.

Individual local authorities have always had the ability to sell council houses to their tenants, but until the early 1970s such sales were extremely rare.

The Labour Party initially proposed the idea of the right of tenants to own the house they live in, in its manifesto for the 1959 General Election which it subsequently lost. Later, the Conservative-controlled Greater London Council of the late 1960s was persuaded by Horace Cutler, its Chairman of Housing, to create a general sales scheme. Cutler disagreed with the concept of local authorities as providers of housing and supported a free market approach. GLC housing sales were not allowed during the Labour administration of the mid-1970s but picked up again once Cutler became Leader in 1977. They proved extremely popular, and Cutler was close to Margaret Thatcher (a London MP) who made the right to buy council housing a Conservative Party policy nationally. The policy was largely in place for the 1974 Conservative manifesto, but did not prove an asset in the two general elections that year because of high interest and mortgage repayment rates, as well as the growth of negative equity as house prices fell.

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