Housing Solicitors

The Conservative Party is proposing to extend Right to Buy to tenants of housing association properties as a key election pledge, The Telegraph reports.

Right to Buy (RTB) enables social housing tenants to buy their rented council property with a discount of up to £102,700.

Housing association properties can only be bought under RTB if the property was transferred to a housing association from a local council – known as “preserved Right to Buy”.

Housing association properties can be bought by tenants under a scheme known as Right to Acquire – but the maximum discount on the property value is just £16,000 and tenants have to have lived in their property for at least five years.

The Tories are planning to change this to enable housing association tenants to buy their homes, by making a change to the 1996 Housing Act.

Under the proposed changes, housing associations would be forced to sell their properties at the discounts set by government.

There are concerns among housing associations, however, that replacing any properties sold under RTB might not be financially viable.

Council properties sold under RTB have to be replaced with another property on a one-to-one basis.

The chief executive of Halton Housing Trust, Nick Atkin said that under the preserved RTB scheme, the trust would have to sell seven housing association homes to be able to afford to build just one replacement.

“In the last five years, the Trust has lost £2.35 million in RTB discounts from the sale of 83 homes,” Mr Atkin said.

“We have a shortage of affordable housing in this country – even the range of current measures can’t fill the gap between demand and the right properties in the right place.

“It seems irrational to then compound the problem with RTB, which merely serves to reduce the number of affordable homes,” Mr Atkin told online publisher 24Dash.com.

He added that under the existing RTA for housing association tenants, the current level of discount on the property value was £9,000.

Since 1980 – when the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher introduced Right to Buy – around 1.5 million council homes have been sold to the private sector, leading to a severe depletion in social housing stock.

Some homes sold under RTB were bought as buy-to-let properties – meaning owners who profited from RTB discounts when buying their home continue to profit and even earn an income by re-letting their former council home at an inflated rent.

The coalition government has increased RTB discounts – meaning more council homes are moving into the private sector.

Some local councils have begun to buy back council homes sold off under RTB – the London Borough of Islington has announced that it has set aside £8m to buy back former RTB properties which come back on to the market at affordable prices, in an effort to boost social housing stock in the borough.

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