Cllr Andrew Woodman is a Cabinet Member on North West Leicestershire District Council.
There’s no doubt the Housing Act of 1980 was revolutionary and was the defining policy of Thatcherism. Home ownership increased from 55 per cent in 1980 to 67 per cent a decade later. Thatcher allowed a generation of working-class council tenants to become homeowners.
This was, however, over 40 years ago when an average house cost just under £20,000 (three times the average salary), land and sites were more plentiful, and we had a decline ahead of small increases in population.
We are living in a different world now, where we have to deal with where we are, and not where we would like it to be. The boom in prices in the 2000s, cheap money and accelerated population growth, has created a more challenging environment for social housing providers, where properties are now eight times the average salary. In my own authority, we saw no building of council properties for the best part of three decades and while we are now building and acquiring properties to deal with a growing waiting list, we are still losing properties to right to buy.
The issue is replacing these properties; under right to buy, local authorities receive about a third of the value of the property lost. Given the rate of inflation in the construction sector, replacing properties with these receipts is becoming an ever more impossible ask.
Many sources within the industry have also reported that rather than the tenant, it’s the family who are driving purchases at substantial discounts, presumably to sell on in the future for a tax-free windfall.
With the challenges facing the sector, it is time for the Conservative Party to wean itself away from right to buy and bring in a uniform right to acquire across the social housing sector. Housing Associations offer discounts of between £9,000 and £16,000 which still prove popular.
With pledges to decarbonize housing stocks to achieve net zero by 2050, many council properties are going to have a lot of costly energy efficiency works. At present, this could be carried out, and the tenant or relatives go on to purchase it at a huge discount with many thousands of pounds of work just completed. It may also be the case that it may be better to decant tenants and rebuild in certain areas when homes leak vast quantities of energy; that’s a difficult task when some properties are privately owned.
Having more certainty over its stock will enable local authorities to better plan its offerings and offer the ability to allow older people whose family has left, the chance to move into smaller more suitable accommodation. Currently many councils are faced with inefficient use of their accommodation through lack of smaller options for downsizing. This was one of the big arguments in favour of the removal of the spare room subsidy in the Cameron government.
The Labor Party is likely to make changes to right to buy, and based on history it is likely that the Conservative Party will oppose this. I think this would be wrong. We can and should, instead, champion the right to acquire which gives housing association tenants the right to a small discount. In addition we need to look at innovative policies to deal with the housing crisis. Labor is setting lots of targets while creating barriers to housing growth, and we must be able to credibly call this out. We therefore need to present ideas for the future of a sector with ever growing demand, ever increasing duties from an active regulator and ombudsman, not to mention the huge task of decarbonising millions of homes over the next 25 years. Moving on from right to buy would be a start.
