People being able to own their own home is not the cause of the housing crisis, decades of insufficient house building and the pressures of mass immigration are the cause.
Right to buy didn’t fuel a housing crisis. The most important line in the article explains the housing crisis;
>Meanwhile, council housing has decreased
Councils stopped providing social housing. That is why there is a demand for private rented accomodation, which drives up rents and makes it attractive for corporate landlords to buy up all available property.
Meanwhile the smart people who bought their council homes in the 1980s are saving the housing crisis from being worse than it is by passing on their homes to their children or by trading up and passing on the profits. Homeowners are not immortal after all. Phil Salter has turned his £17,000 into £1.1m worth of property forhis children to inherit, assuming he has any. Danielle meanwhile doesn’t need to buy, rent or apply for social housing. She will inherit her mother’s house in London and can live there or sell up and move.
The article, far from criticising right to buy, highlights the benfits.
The two-faced nature of the Guardian truly is astounding it really is no better than the Daily Mail.
Why don’t they block pension funds from buying residential property?
If you give your money to a pension fund, they can invest it before tax. If you decide to save money for a house, you pay income tax on that money – so you automatically have less money than a pension fund and likely they’ll still outbid you.
It’s a cancer that should be stopped!
One of the biggest problems is that when people get social housing they will never leave it.
I have several relative who used right to buy council houses at deep discount rates. They then sold those houses for vast profits and utilized the money. Then declared themselves homeless to get ANOTHER council house.
Thatch selling of council housing stock at below market rates is directly responsible for this cycle of destruction. She is the worst Prime Minister since WW2.
They were told at the time that it would cause just this long-term problem but they went ahead anyway. The Privatisation of public housing (they intend *extending* it too) like many other privatisations has been a disaster.
I once heard that less housing has been built under the Tories than even Thatcher initially promised to build, let alone fulfilling later promises by other politicians- Anyone know if that’s true?
Nothing at all to do with the thousands of immigrants poring into the country. Nope nothing to see here move on!
Perhaps this is only tangentially related, but I recall some distant relatives, a young couple with a child at the time, being offered £15,000 (or thereabouts, it essentially gave them a deposit to buy a house) to move out of their council property – supposedly to free it up for others in the early 2000s.
Was this a particular scheme, or is this kind of offer usual for council housing tenants?
I agree with a lot of the comments and the articles but also feel that it’s not just a government created problem.
They mention all those people who triggered the right to buy and then sold or rented their houses out…without keeping them in good condition letting them deteriorate…surely they have some blame too?
The Tories initially set a target of building 300,000 homes a year in 2010 under Cameron. That figure has never been hit and the target has been lowered several times, with successive governments always failing to hit the current target. People cannot buy houses if the government refuses to build them.
Yeah! This is exactly why no one should be able to buy the properties they rent. Everyone who’s not a multimillionaire posh toff aristocrat, should spend their whole lives living in rented accommodation only! Thank you very much, Brexit(!)
Wanna know a neat trick to crash the housing market?
Wanna know why the tories are still letting in so many immigrants, of which a majority RENT
A true hard Brexit. Shut the border. (which the tories don’t want). If you want to lower house prices you’re gonna have to either build a ridiculous amount more or kick out the immigrants. Make it so landlords struggle to profit, they will sell their homes. House prices on mass will collapse.
As much as almost all of you lefties won’t admit it. If you really wanted to bring down the cost of houses and rent, you’d push for a limit on people coming to live here.
I own my own home, so I don’t really want the prices to crash, but if you ever want to own your own home whilst working a supermarket job. The fastest way to undo this mess is to shut the border and build more homes. Or shut the border and kick out those on a visa.
Remember, more immigrants are arriving on our shores faster than we can build houses.
Rather than taking an emotional response to this comment, seriously have a think about it.
14 comments
People being able to own their own home is not the cause of the housing crisis, decades of insufficient house building and the pressures of mass immigration are the cause.
Right to buy didn’t fuel a housing crisis. The most important line in the article explains the housing crisis;
>Meanwhile, council housing has decreased
Councils stopped providing social housing. That is why there is a demand for private rented accomodation, which drives up rents and makes it attractive for corporate landlords to buy up all available property.
Meanwhile the smart people who bought their council homes in the 1980s are saving the housing crisis from being worse than it is by passing on their homes to their children or by trading up and passing on the profits. Homeowners are not immortal after all. Phil Salter has turned his £17,000 into £1.1m worth of property forhis children to inherit, assuming he has any. Danielle meanwhile doesn’t need to buy, rent or apply for social housing. She will inherit her mother’s house in London and can live there or sell up and move.
The article, far from criticising right to buy, highlights the benfits.
The two-faced nature of the Guardian truly is astounding it really is no better than the Daily Mail.
Why don’t they block pension funds from buying residential property?
If you give your money to a pension fund, they can invest it before tax. If you decide to save money for a house, you pay income tax on that money – so you automatically have less money than a pension fund and likely they’ll still outbid you.
It’s a cancer that should be stopped!
One of the biggest problems is that when people get social housing they will never leave it.
I have several relative who used right to buy council houses at deep discount rates. They then sold those houses for vast profits and utilized the money. Then declared themselves homeless to get ANOTHER council house.
Thatch selling of council housing stock at below market rates is directly responsible for this cycle of destruction. She is the worst Prime Minister since WW2.
They were told at the time that it would cause just this long-term problem but they went ahead anyway. The Privatisation of public housing (they intend *extending* it too) like many other privatisations has been a disaster.
I once heard that less housing has been built under the Tories than even Thatcher initially promised to build, let alone fulfilling later promises by other politicians- Anyone know if that’s true?
Nothing at all to do with the thousands of immigrants poring into the country. Nope nothing to see here move on!
Perhaps this is only tangentially related, but I recall some distant relatives, a young couple with a child at the time, being offered £15,000 (or thereabouts, it essentially gave them a deposit to buy a house) to move out of their council property – supposedly to free it up for others in the early 2000s.
Was this a particular scheme, or is this kind of offer usual for council housing tenants?
I agree with a lot of the comments and the articles but also feel that it’s not just a government created problem.
They mention all those people who triggered the right to buy and then sold or rented their houses out…without keeping them in good condition letting them deteriorate…surely they have some blame too?
The Tories initially set a target of building 300,000 homes a year in 2010 under Cameron. That figure has never been hit and the target has been lowered several times, with successive governments always failing to hit the current target. People cannot buy houses if the government refuses to build them.
Yeah! This is exactly why no one should be able to buy the properties they rent. Everyone who’s not a multimillionaire posh toff aristocrat, should spend their whole lives living in rented accommodation only! Thank you very much, Brexit(!)
Wanna know a neat trick to crash the housing market?
Wanna know why the tories are still letting in so many immigrants, of which a majority RENT
A true hard Brexit. Shut the border. (which the tories don’t want). If you want to lower house prices you’re gonna have to either build a ridiculous amount more or kick out the immigrants. Make it so landlords struggle to profit, they will sell their homes. House prices on mass will collapse.
As much as almost all of you lefties won’t admit it. If you really wanted to bring down the cost of houses and rent, you’d push for a limit on people coming to live here.
I own my own home, so I don’t really want the prices to crash, but if you ever want to own your own home whilst working a supermarket job. The fastest way to undo this mess is to shut the border and build more homes. Or shut the border and kick out those on a visa.
Remember, more immigrants are arriving on our shores faster than we can build houses.
Rather than taking an emotional response to this comment, seriously have a think about it.