This week marks the centenary of Margaret Thatcher’s birth. More than 12 years after her death she still casts a massive shadow over the politics, housing and wider society of Britain in 2025.
This legacy is sometimes hard to spot – at least at first. Take number 8 Frobisher Drive. It appears to be an ordinary house on an ordinary road in Swindon. Sitting at the end of a terrace of four houses behind a grass verge, its pitched roof, dark orange bricks and boxy windows are almost exactly how a child would draw a house. But behind the bricks and mortar is a story of serious money.
Until March 2015, the property was a council house. Then the tenant decided to buy it under Right to Buy. For that, Swindon Council got £30,000. Records suggest it was sold in April 2021 when, in the space of six years, the owners managed to turn each pound into five, selling the house for £150,000 and banking £120,000. The buyer? Swindon Council. Meaning every penny of profit was at the taxpayers expense.
The cash-strapped council was forced into this ‘act of desperation’ by a lack of social homes. The house on Frobisher Drive is no anomaly. Big Issue has found over 100 examples in a sample of councils across the country, sold off and then re-purchased at considerable loss. We call them Yo-yo Homes.
Read all about them in this week’s magazine. Also in this week’s Big Issue, professor Stephen Farrall assesses where her policies have carried us, while Grantham reveals details of a festival celebrating its most famous daughter.
What else is in this week’s Big Issue
The real life of a showgirl
Taylor Swift’s new album has broken her own sales records. On it, she celebrates the life of a showgirl, but is it all glamour beneath the glitter? These showgirls give us a peek under the sequins
