A Common Wealth report called the discounted sales of council homes one of the “largest giveaways in UK history”.A Common Wealth report called the discounted sales of council homes one of the "largest giveaways in UK history".A Common Wealth report called the discounted sales of council homes one of the “largest giveaways in UK history”.

Right to buy in England helped “fuel” the housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200 BILLION. A Common Wealth report called the discounted sales of council homes one of the “largest giveaways in UK history”.

The Common Wealth thinktank said the policy had fuelled vast shortages in social housing and turbocharged inequality. Since 1980/81 the policy has seen 1.9 million council homes in England sold to tenants at an average discount of 44 per cent of market value, earning cash receipts of over £51 billion.

The report estimates that the homes sold by English local authorities through RTB since 1980/81 are now worth a total of £430 billion (in 2024 prices), putting it into close competition with the gradual sell-off of public land — estimated to be worth roughly £400 billion as of 2016 — for the accolade of the largest privatisation in UK history.

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Chris Hayes, the thinktank’s chief economist, said: “The severe financial straits facing councils should be seen in the context of a decades-long assault on local government, in which right to buy was a central pillar, denying councils discretion over how best to use assets that they had built.

“Now those assets are in dire shortage and councils still bear the heightened cost of seeing people through the housing crisis.”

Kwajo Tweneboa, a social housing campaigner, said right to buy had “gutted council housing and transferred public wealth into private hands”.

“We’re in a housing emergency. Millions stuck on waiting lists. Tens of thousands living in temporary accommodation that’s unfit and unsafe. All while homes that were once publicly owned are now profit-generating assets for private landlords,” he said.

To the extent that the private letting of these former council homes is subsidised by Housing Benefit, this amounts to the “British government [doing] the exact opposite of what it has encouraged households to do: to buy their own homes, rather than renting,” as James Meek frames it. “Thatcher and her successors have done all they can to sell off the nation’s bricks and mortar, only to be forced to rent it back, at inflated prices, from the people they sold it to.”