Right To Buy made property ownership a reality for many, but it rigged the game for future generations. Image: William Warby on Unsplash
Share
There is a seductive appeal to the three-word political slogan. If it scans, it lands.
Take Back Control. Black Lives Matter. Ulster Says No. We Shall Overcome. Make Poverty History. Stop the Boats. They deliver with clarity and imprint an almost immediate, implicit, meaning. Sometimes the phrase defines and leads an entire political ideology.
Few, if any, have had such a real-world consequential impact on modern Britain as this one: Right to Buy. Over the last 45 years this core Thatcherite policy, launched with her Housing Act in 1980, has seen at least 1.9 million social homes in England sold to tenants. The average discount was at 44% of market value. It has brought around £51 billion to the exchequer.
A report from the Common Wealth think tank (focusing on England) bubbled the details back to the political surface and added another new element. They estimate what Right to Buy cost us all.
At today’s market value, that volume of public housing would be worth £430bn, they calculate. Of that, £194bn equity was given away in the reduced-market-value sales. Think how useful that would be in the public sphere.
That only tells a small part of the story. A very real consequence was the small percentage of sale income that came back to each council, and how only a fraction of those funds were available for building new stock to replenish that which was sold.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Much of the income was ring-fenced for paying down debts – and central government block grants were sometimes predicated on meeting these requirements. So, one of the reasons council housing wasn’t replaced was because councils didn’t have any money. It was craftily kept from them by Westminster.
The overall idea of Right to Buy was not a bad one. Allowing people the chance to own property in which they had been tenants for years, for them to be homeowners when they never thought they could, was a positive plan.
But the underlying ideology, clearly, led to the problems we’re in now. Trying to minimise the power of the state, particularly at local level, was a desired outcome. And it didn’t work. We all see the outcomes of this misguided move – lack of suitable housing stock and councils now having to spend more and more of their dwindling income on helping people in homelessness, or at risk of homelessness, rather than having been able to catch nascent problems much further upstream. As Common Wealth puts it, this was a “pivot from subsidising supply to subsidising demand”.
None of this is to say that we wouldn’t have a housing crisis if Right to Buy had not been instituted. Demand would still have gone up and there is no way the existing stock would have met it all. But it would have helped and certainly would have prevented the knock-on need which has led to spiralling private rents.
Coincidentally, last week the government was warned they’re falling short of targets for new homes. Figures show that 201,000 new homes in England got their Energy Performance Certificate in 12 months to June 2025. This is a key indicator of a new property being completed. It’s down 8% on the previous year.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
The government said despite this they’d meet their target of 1.5 million new homes by the next election. That, maths fans, brings us to 325,000 a year now needed.
These are not exactly happy summer thoughts so here is one to end on: Nobel award-winning chemist professor David MacMillan said he thinks within five years there’ll be drugs to successfully treat Alzheimer’s. That doesn’t need a three-word slogan to sell it!
