The Welsh Government is planning to end the right of social housing tenants to buy their home.
The right-to-buy scheme, a policy introduced by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, will be abolished if Labour is returned to power in the 2016 Welsh Assembly Elections.
Ministers claim that over the past 30 years, the policy has resulted in a significant reduction in social housing stock.
Between 1981 and 2014, 138,423 council homes were sold – a 45% reduction in the social housing available when the policy was first introduced.
Communities and Tackling Poverty Minister, Lesley Griffiths, has published a White Paper setting out the Welsh Government’s intention to end Right to Buy and Right to Acquire.
The Right to Buy and Right to Acquire allows eligible social housing tenants to buy their council or housing association home at a discount of up to £16,000.
The Minister has also set out plans today to halve the current maximum discount from £16,000 to £8,000.
Lesley Griffiths said: “Many families depend on social housing for a safe, secure and affordable place to live.
“Our supply of homes is under considerable pressure and we are still seeing social rented properties being taken out of our social housing stock because of the Right to Buy, which is forcing many vulnerable people to wait longer for a home. This is why decisive action is needed to protect our social housing to make sure it is available for those who need it most.”
The Housing (Wales) Measure 2011 allows local authorities to apply for permission to suspend the Right to Buy and Right to Acquire locally to help tackle housing pressures. Carmarthenshire Council was the first local authority to ask the Welsh Government to suspend of Right to Buy and, today, the Communities and Tackling Poverty Minister, Lesley Griffiths, approved Carmarthenshire’s application.
The Minister added: “We are taking action to protect Wales’ social housing stock – as well as moving to end Right to Buy. During this term of Government, we are investing over £400 million in affordable homes through our Social Housing Grant programme. Since 2011, 6,890 additional affordable homes have been delivered across Wales, while we are just 529 short of our target of bringing 5,000 empty homes back into use this Assembly term.”
The White Paper consultation seeks the public’s views on the proposals. The consultation will close on 16 April 2015
The Right to Buy has diminished our social housing stock making it harder for people on low incomes to live independently. This depletion in the amount of social housing available has created increased demand and has driven prices up in the private rented sector. This has resulted to an increase in the levels of housing benefit being made to residents living in private rented accommodation meaning the tax payer has effectively subsidised the cost of this policy. The whole point of social housing was undermined by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory Government and sadly not reversed during Labour’s years in Government. What we need is more, not less social housing. My short experience as an elected councillor has strengthened my view that there isn’t enough supply of affordable homes. Not everybody can afford to live in new build 3 or 4 bedroom property. The costs of which can be far beyond the reach of those on low incomes. I hope these plans go ahead and maybe Local Authorities can look again at building social housing.
Let us not ignore the benefits of the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, or the workings of the re-launched scheme in 2012.
The scheme has created huge amounts of wealth for the worst off in society. Many people bought their homes at a discounted price of around £20,000 when the scheme was first launched to realise their house is now worth in excess of £200,000. In old age selling your house for £200,000 not only covers the cost of care, it is often enough to enable your children to pay off their mortgages, creating wealthier people in future generations.
Then there is the issue of quality. Driving around Caerphilly there are several estate where no respectable person goes. The estates are dominated council houses and people who do not care about their house. Any damage they have caused is footed by the council, any problems is the council’s fault, and any general upkeep you and I would do on our home is the council’s fault. These areas have became full of low-quality, grotty housing not taken care of by the people living in tem. Ultimately social housing in itself is much a failure. On the other hand, we have see the people who used to live in council estates buy their home. People always take more care of things they own. Some estates once dominated by council housing are now pleasant, tidy, estates.
While it’s the brainchild of the 1959 Labour manifesto, and later the Conservative GLC leader Horance Cutler, the grave error came from the inability to use the receipts from the sale of social houses on new social houses. The stock was constantly being depleted as you said.
However, Cameron did change the workings in 2012 allowing local authorities to plow the receipts into building more social housing. Unfortunately the discounts have been cut to a mere £8000 giving little incentive to tenants to want to buy their houses. it is impossible to reinvest the proceeds in new builds if fewer houses are being sold. The answer is not to end ‘Right to Buy’, but increase the discount to free up more money to build new social housing.
Social Housing providers should have been required to build houses to replace every house sold under the Right to buy Scheme. This would have still enabled those who aspire to own their own home to do so, whilst maintaining the social housing stock.
I dont think this should turn into one thing or the other, if Council were allowed to spend reserves on house building scheme it would not only maintain the social housing stock it would create and maintain local jobs.
This would also have had a benificial effect on homelessness and a huge reduction in the £3,000,000 (£3 million pounds) plus, spent on homelessness provision in Caerphilly County alone this current year, It is not rocket science it is more to do with political party ideoligy, and, without the rights of Councils to build homes to replace those sold off by Maggie Thatcher, and her deliberate attempts to reduce social housing provisions, ( no one in a Council House voted Labour it was said by her advisors) the policy was designed to get us to where we are today in respect to a huge reduction in social housing and until someone gets a gip of it in Wales the problems of homelessness will continue..
in the interest of fairness I think it’s important we note Cameron changed the rules in 2012 allowing local authorities to use the proceeds from selling social houses in the building of more houses. However, smaller discounts have led to reduced sale and little revenue for the council. Also, the council is too busy wasting the money on other things.
One of Thatcher’s stupidest decisions, and she made many, was to force councils to sell off their substantial housing stock. I want to make it clear that I do not criticise those people who bought their council home as it was a rational thing to do. They were paying rent, often for decades, and the chance to buy a house at discount rate was sensible.
That said, we need to examine the cost to all of us of this programme. This experiment pushed up the price of private housing. Firstly people who had paid, say £8,000 for their council house in the early 1980’s were now sitting on property worth double that at the market price of the day. They could sell to move to a more desirable area with a massive, ready made, deposit. This increased the prices of all houses. Supply and demand.
The first council houses to be sold were the better constructed ones, roomy homes, often with front and back gardens, that were most suitable for families. Families were now renting from the private sector, hitherto very small in this area, and were charged higher rents than those previously payable on council estates. Coupled with Thatcher’s dismantling of the mining and manufacturing industries of Wales led to further cost. A family bread winner who once had been paid a reasonable wage in industry was now in a lower skilled, lower paid, job in retail or offices. This led to workers being paid top -up benefits in order to meet the rental cost. This was paid for by all of us and went into the hands of private landlords. Supply and demand again.
Once the best of the council housing stock was in private hands the less desirable, shoddy houses were left with the council. This led to ghettos made up of the least well off who lived in poor housing that needed expensive maintenance or reconstruction, all paid for by the rest of us.
I could go on but my meaning is clear, the result of council house sales increased the cost of housing and taxes for all of us and left the poorest with fewer options and usually left them in the last, run down, examples of council housing as many landlords naturally prefer to offer their stock to those in stable employment rather than take a chance on whether someone on benefits only would be a responsible tennant.
Until I bought my first house, at the age of twenty, I lived in a council house and have seen how Thatcher’s social experiment has turned out. It did benefit many people but in doing so incurred massive costs for everyone, left the council with only poor housing stock and created ghettoes in every town. People believe Thatcher to have been a Conservative but I agree with, journalist and author, Peter Hitchen that rather than Conservative values she actually increased the cost and power of the state to the detriment of all working people in Britain.
Labour can’t stand the fact that people may actually benefit from the right to buy scheme, they hate the idea that ordinary normal folk might better themselves, make a few quid, prosper and own a property. Welsh Labour want to keep people down, they appear to take pride in the fact that Wales is a poor deprived country and that’s the way they want it. There is a housing shortage in Wales because Welsh Labour hasn’t built anywhere near enough new homes, all they have succeed in doing is increase red tape so much that it now costs £3000 more to build a house in Wales than it does to build the equivalent house in England, and when the ridiculous sprinker system is forced on house builders it will cost even more to build a new home, little wonder that developers are now refusing to build in some parts of Wales.
Usual hollow, out dated nonsense by a Labour Party so out if touch. 15 years or Blair and no change to housing. Welsh Government had done nothing for years on the matter. In fact the Labour controlled Welsh Goverment made it mandatory for each council to ask its residents to vote to keep the housing local authority owned or transferred to housing associations – effectively privatising. They consistantly refused to allow councils to borrow money to pay for improvement. These socialists couldn’t wait to profit from their council house and are now paying the price.
The issue here is that Council Housing as it should be called rather that Labour fluffy terms like social housing etc was designed for hard working families to have decent affordable accommodation. What has happened is every girl who can’t say no thst now had three kids by three different fathers can have a house paid for by the tax payer whilst those wig deserve it are left to the commercial market.
As had been said, the most important thing for Labour is to keep people at the lowest possible place to ensure votes.