Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has said that she supports the government’s Right to Buy Housing scheme, but that it needs reform to make it ‘fairer’ to the taxpayer. The Right to Buy scheme allows secure council tenants and some housing associations the legal right to purchase the council home they live in. Speaking to the BBC ahead of her speech at the Labour Party Conference, Rayner stood by the scheme recognising that it was important that long-term social tenants were able to purchase their homes. However, she also stated that due to the ‘huge discounts’ introduced by the previous Conservative government, a consultation was needed to review the rules of the scheme to make it ‘fairer’ to the UK taxpayer.
Originally introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1980, the Right to Buy scheme has enabled millions of council tenants to become homeowners. However, the scheme is also considered to be responsible for the dramatic decline in available social housing. Housing stock has fell from 6.5 million units in 1979 to approximately 2 million in 2017, as the goal of creating one new home for each sold has not been met. Since 2011, the Conservative Government has steadily increased the discounts available under Right to Buy in order to revitalise the housing market. Rayner said today that while she thought it fair a tenant had the right to buy their home, there had to be ‘balance’.
‘The changes the previous government made have made it a lot easier with a huge discount for people to buy the social housing and we just cannot replace them.’
The maximum discount currently available to council tenants, depending on the length of their tenancy, currently stands at 70% or £80,900 across England, £108,000 in London boroughs whichever is lower. However, the failure to replace social stock has attracted criticism. Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham called for the scheme to be suspended earlier in the year as he described tackling the housing crisis the city faces as like ‘trying to fill a with the plug out’.
Rayner has also in the last few months outlined plans to make good on Labour’s election promise that 1.5 million new homes would be built by the end of this parliament. But when pressed on what proportion of the new builds would allocated for social housing, the deputy leader became evasive.
‘I think it is really difficult to put an exact target on that because it depends on whether it is through a new town, access on a site with a grey belt or whether it is an urban site.’
She did however pledge to improve the quality of social housing by implementing Awaab’s law (a law aimed at fixing damp and mouldy homes, named after a toddler who died as a result of exposure to mould) and touted the government’s plan to introduce planning passports to speed up developments in urban areas. She echoed the words of other senior Labour ministers, including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, in saying that the country's problems had to be faced and there could be more difficult choices ahead.
)Sources: bbc.co.uk)
