Introduction

The Right to Buy marked a significant change of approach to housing in the UK. It was followed by a period in which the role of councils in shaping local housing declined along with council housing. After 35 years, it is now possible to offer a verdict on the success of the Right to Buy experiment. The policy rewarded one generation of tenants, and made a real difference for most of these households. Some 2 million Right to Buy sales between 1980 and 2015 increased the level of home ownership. While this could be seen as evidence of success, the incentives associated with the policy and the context in which it operated meant it would have been surprising had this not been achieved. A longer-term evaluation would refer to the failure to sustain home ownership at a higher level – the Right to Buy expanded home ownership temporarily through extraordinary discounts that were only available once for each property, and a significant proportion of these properties were transferred to other tenures on resale.

Without measures to reinvest the capital receipts from Right to Buy sales, housing shortages had also become a major concern across the UK by 2016. New construction remained much lower than before 1980, and fell far short of what was needed to meet demographic change, let alone rising aspirations. There was growing evidence of unhealthy and inappropriate housing, alongside inflation of house prices at the top of the market. The Right to Buy forms part of the explanation for more severe housing problems, and the common reference to a housing crisis. From strategic and long-term perspectives the overall policy approach of successive governments has been a failure. There has been too little building, too little social housing to meet need or demand, too little local capacity to address problems of access, affordability and housing need, and too little attention given to the poor quality of much of the existing housing stock.

The government has faced increasing Housing Benefit costs associated with tenants paying market rents in the private sector – because there is too little public and social housing available with lower rents.