Opinion: Right To Buy needs to change

Our writer argues that Right to Buy is harming our social housing system and needs to change fast.

What could be better than the right to buy your council house? It’s a chance to secure your family home, and enjoy all the benefits and status of home ownership.

For those who succeed in buying their council home, the answer is probably: there’s very little better.

Right to Buy is a scheme that helps people buy an actual stake in their community, a guarantee of stability and the chance to own some of Britain’s property wealth.

Unfortunately, it’s essentially a lottery system for housing security.

People in council houses have already won the housing lottery: they already have housing security, they already know their children can keep attending the same school because they won’t have to move once a year.

People in the private rented sector (PRS) have no such security. Worse still, sold-off council houses are not being replaced.

For every Right To Buy winner, there are dozens of families left trapped in insecure rented accommodation. Yet each property sold makes their chances of getting secure council housing even weaker…

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Right to buy, forced to sell

Back in April 2012, the Government revamped the Right To Buy scheme by raising the maximum discount that was offered.

That meant that some buyers were able to secure a discount of up to £75,000, and that’s even more in some parts of the UK now.

This incentive made buying far more possible for far more people. In the year 2011-12, around 2,600 homes were sold. By 2016-17, that had risen to 13,400, according to the Local Government Association (LGA).

That’s an increase of more than 400%.

Now that might not sound like a bad thing – after all, if homes are sold and homes are built then we simply have a nation of ever more secure households. Unfortunately, that is not what actually happens.

You see, when a council home is sold, the council in question is only able to keep around a third of the discounted price with the remainder being diverted to the Treasury.

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That means that councils are forced to sell their council housing for vast discounts and then only keep a third of what they get for it anyway. How are they supposed to build more under that system?

Under Right to Buy (RTB), almost 58,000 council homes have been sold off in the last six years but just a fifth of those have been replaced. You don’t exactly have to be a maths whizz to see that this is unsustainable.

Cllr Judith Blake, housing spokesperson at the LGA, said that councils do want to support people’s aspirations to own their homes.

“However, selling council homes at a discount of nearly half price has led to a social housing fire sale that threatens the future of the scheme.

“The rate of homes sold under RTB combined with the restrictions on councils is making replacing homes sold virtually impossible.

“This loss of social rented housing risks pushing more families into the private rented sector, driving up housing benefit spending and rents and exacerbating our homelessness crisis.

"This is particularly concerning as many of the homes sold through the scheme ended up being rented out privately at more expensive rates.”

In the meantime, social housing in Britain has reached a record low. In fact, in some areas, the waiting list for council housing is a decade long.

This ‘aspirational scheme’ is locking some vulnerable people out of secure accommodation.

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The favoured few

Housing security shouldn’t be like a lottery, it should not be sheer chance that enables some people to live in secure, council-owned rented accommodation while others live in less secure homes within the PRS.

After all, while many private landlords are excellent, there is no comparative security of tenure. Tenants can be asked to move on, with all the associated costs and difficulties of shifting their lives to a new home.

They can’t relax once their children have a place at a local school because the risk they will have to move is too great.

What’s more, private rented accommodation increases the risk of poverty.

A study by Shelter published last summer showed that more than a million households living in the PRS are at risk of becoming homeless by 2020 thanks to rising rents, frozen benefits and a lack of social housing to pick up the slack.

The report warned that the current housing policy relies on the PRS to accommodate people who cannot afford to buy.

However, Shelter said that this model is “increasingly not working” thanks to landlords with blanket bans on benefit claimants, rising rents and moving costs, a shortage of properties leading to affordability issues and many other barriers preventing tenants from finding secure, affordable housing.

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Those tenants struggling to find somewhere reliable and affordable should be able to turn to council housing.

But not only have we not built enough to meet demand, we’re selling off what we do have to people who already had a better rental deal.

How could we change it?

I think Right to Buy is a good idea and one that has benefitted some families enormously. However, without an extensive programme to build new council homes to replace them, it risks becoming a fire sale at a time when secure housing is in short supply.

The LGA suggests that councils should be able to set their own affordable discounts and to keep 100% of the sale receipts so that they can build new homes to replace those that have sold.

To me, it seems so obvious that this needs to happen if we are to preserve council housing stock that I can’t help but question why such measures are not already in place.

Otherwise, if we carry on at this rate of sales, our council housing stock will deplete even further, increasing housing insecurity and hurting financially vulnerable people just to help a favoured few.

Ultimately, Right to Buy may be popular but it mustn’t trump other people’s right to live in a secure and adequate home.

What do you think? Is Right to Buy good for communities or bad? Have you benefitted from it? Have your say using the comments below.