Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/03/right-to-buy-england-fuelled-housing-crisis-cost-taxpayers-common-weath-report

by Rewindcasette

28 comments

  1. The right to buy group on Facebook makes me laugh. These people feel like they’ve been majorly wronged because they now can’t save 70% off a house. They seriously think they’re entitled to a discounted house because they’ve spent their life being subsidised by the government and the council.

    Try getting a job and buying one full price like the majority of the country has to.

  2. It’ll go down in history as one of the worst policies that the government has implemented.

    But hey, it won them some voters. So that’s all right.

  3. In 1980 the government owned 32% of houses. Now they own 16%.

    The UK housing stock is worth about £9.2 trillion so the 16% of it they have up would be worth today £1.4 trillion or about half the national debt.

    Now granted maybe this is an overestimate because maybe the houses they owned were on the the lower end of the market, but even the article estimates the right to buy houses alone would be worth “£430bn after taking account of inflation and the surge in property prices since 1980.”

  4. Right to buy was abolished here in Cymru several years ago. Probably for the best as, if I recall correctly, these houses were sold for way under their actual value and most will end up in the hands of private landlords eventually.

    I must admit it was a bit annoying as my mum’s council house is nice and she’d saved for a deposit to buy it as she’d lived in it for nigh on 10 years, then RTB was abolished just before she had enough. Again probably for the best though.

  5. It was a real shame to have sold housing stock that could have provided affordable rent for the poorest. 

    It would have been better to have built more council housing rather than allowing it to be sold. 

    It would have left permanent housing that could have been reused and provided a necessary safety net for those who needed it. 

  6. Right to buy was never the issue. The issue was the local councils never used the money raised to build more houses. Absolutely nothing wrong with buying the house you’ve lived in for years. The government should have charged actual market value and then reinvested the money into building new houses, that was the issue.

  7. I’d be interested to see how this compares in effect to the buy to let scheme instead

    Especially as right to buy mainly benefits normal homeowners whereas the other benefits rich landlords…. I can’t imagine why the focus would be on one and not the other.

  8. The house was sold to the person living in it, who if they hadn’t purchased it would still have been living in it. So it made no difference.

    The issue is they didn’t take the money from the sale and build more homes. It’s the lack of home building and the increase in population that has caused the crisis.

  9. All of Thatchers wrongs are now being highlighted in many of the huge social & political issues we have today.

    Selling – almost giving away – national assets to private ownership, we’re seeing them run into the ground, saddled with debt & rotten service.. though with great PR & marketing: smoke & mirrors.

    Many industries that should never have been sold off.

    By far, in my lifetime: Thatcher, is the worst thing to happen to Britain, by far.

  10. No it didn’t.
    The failure to allow councils the ability to use that money to build replacement council homes did.

  12. Ok, so that really isnt the reason we have a housing crisis. Guardian is blaming the wrong people, and they know it.
    Right to buy without building new council houses does indeed reduce the available council housing stock.
    But that is a tiny percentage of the Buy to Let market.
    Low interest rates post financial crisis with minimal deposits turned the rental market on it’s head.
    People could own second / third / fourth properties with interest only mortgages and reap huge rewards.
    Making a landlord class that lived off their property income.
    That’s why there are less houses for people to buy, it’s because people buy them (now via limited companies) to rent out, an income generating asset, with a good yield is worth spending more on.
    That’s what is pushing up house prices.

  13. The housing system across the developed world is basically broken.

    I think it fundamentally comes down to seeing housing as an commodity/ investment rather than a basic requirement for life.

    Foreign oligarchs/corporations as well as UK corporations and serial landlords buy up all the property and hoarde it as an investment.
    Home builders purposely slow the rate of building to increase the profit on each home they build and NIMBYS protect their investment by opposing any new build in their area.

    We need stronger controls on home builders, limit the number of houses and disincentive multiple home ownership/ landlords via taxation and re-assess our zoning laws to favour mixed use housing.

    Standards required for landlords needs to come up significantly too.

    Immigration plays a part but that’s a separate issue. We can’t focus solely on immigration as that’s only part.of the problem.

    We need to start treating housing as something a basic requirement for a human rather than an investment opportunity. It’s a limited resource that’s prone to being exploited when treated as an investment/commodity.

    This is a serious threat to the continuation of developed society as we know it, unless we want the world to look something like cyberpunk.

  14. Where I live, you mostly have the choice between buying over priced new builds, or an over priced ex-council house. We have 3 new build developments around town right now – at least 30% or so of those plots go for social housing. It’s great that social tenants are getting decent accommodation, but it’s crazy that an average buyer has to struggle to afford an ex-council house.

  15. The headline below this on r/uk: “Fears that house prices will fall”. Great dichotomy. Remember, it’s not a housing crisis to the people who own houses, it’s profit.

  16. The government owns the house, and the government gets rent.

    The government sells the house, owners sell the house, and a landlord buys it.

    Tenants can’t afford the rent, and the government pays the landlord.

    Isn’t that it?

  17. The right to buy should be abolished. Capable people should be allowed to stay only for a certain duration. Earn a job like the rest and work your way up.

  18. The issue lies with the councils who decided to pocket the money from the rents/sales of property instead of investing it into building new housing stock

  19. This is the first step on the road to completely abolishing council houses all together and forcing people who can’t afford it, to rent privately with rents 3 and 4 times the price of a council house.

    They want to destroy any and all help that exists to try and prevent people from becoming homeless.

  20. Right to buy was a twig on a bonfire in terms of fuel…. THE REAL REASON IS WEATHLY PEOPLE AND INSTITUTIONS BUYING IT ALL UP.

  21. There are more houses in the UK than adults. Maybe there wouldn’t be a crisis if we didn’t let people own more than 1 each…

  22. Yeah people have been saying this for 20 years…it blindingly obvious and just another thing Thatcher did to fuck us over.

  23. Britain, a great place to be anyone except those who PAYE tax.

  24. Does that include the 23.4 billion that the government spend yearly on housing benefit? As rents increase and assuming the level of social housing remains low then that cost is going to remain very high.

  25. Time to revise Thatchers legacy to what a fair portion of the country already knew.

    One of the worst prime ministers ever.

  26. No shit. The rich buying them all up through schemes etc. AGAIN…

  27. No… I’m pretty sure all the super wealthy are buying up massive amounts of houses to resell/rent/or just own assets killed the housing market.
    When the wealth gap gets bigger, more houses are bought, more houses are built for the wealthy to buy as they’re the only ones who can too… This all in turn spikes up the price of houses, rent etc…

    This is late stage capitalism. No amount of extra houses, no amount of council houses… Will fix this.

  28. You shouldn’t have to have 2 people working full time and saving / sacrificing for 10 years just to get a deposit on a rubbish house, they then do up and sell to afford a normal house. Not when you used to be able to get a good 3 bed house on one income 40 years ago.

    The UK has ample space to build houses. We also have a massive amount of abandoned houses. We could do with discouraging people from stockpiling houses too, at least until there’s a more balanced market.

    I say that as a homeowner who got a new build for 205 and now 7 years later it’s worth 320+ which is ridiculous tbh. I don’t need it to be increasing by 50%!

Comments are closed.