Right to Buy is a deeply unequal stopgap, not a solution to the Housing Crisis

Under George Osborne's direction, the Conservative approach to tackling the housing crisis was to resurrect Thatcherism. This came in the form of Right to Buy, the cheap sell off of social housing to first time buyers.

The trouble is, from the start, it was always going to be a time and resource limited solution. Eventually, as always, the Tories would run out of public assets to privatise and the well would run dry.

As New Statesman Political Editor George Eaton put it, "the problem with Thatcherism is that eventually you run out of other people's assets."

Today, the homelessness charity Crisis and the Local Government Association (LGA) were on the same page in calling out the effects of Right to Buy on social housing: the draining of a vital resource that is not being replaced.

Right to Buy, like Thatcherite policies in the 1980s, plugged gaps created by the withdrawal of the state with privatised public assets to buy time for the private sector to get prepared to take over and pick up the slack.

Osborne's policy kept the middle class housing sector afloat at the expense of social housing - even that technically owned by housing association independent from the government - which was sorely needed to provide affordable shelter for the least well off.

Now as then, the results are wildly inconsistent and deeply unequal.

Crisis have put forward a strategy to eliminate poverty in the next decade that puts new social housing - a hundred thousand new homes a year - at the centre. It combines these with a national rollout of Housing First and the strengthening of the rights of renters.

The LGA say that the core of any sustainable social housing plans, like those proposed by Crisis, must by necessity be devolving proper funding to local government so it can get on with the work of building homes.

For progressives, redistributing funds to local government for affordable and social housing is a clear cut issue - especially to poorer areas that see the least benefit from a scheme that doesn't even return the full receipts from the sale of local housing assets. But will Conservatives listen?

References

'Spending Review Preview: Osborne has led government to bet the house on policies like Right to Buy cutting cost of living'; in The Alternative; 23 November 2015.

George Eaton's 'The Conservatives are in crisis because "popular capitalism" is no longer possible'; in the News Statesman; 30 May 2018.

'Homelessness could end in a decade, says charity Crisis'; on the BBC; 11 June 2018.

Jessica McKay's 'Councils able to replace just one-third of homes sold under right to buy'; in The Guardian; 11 June 2018.