Right to Buy: a complicated legacy 

The Right to Buy scheme has cost UK taxpayers almost £200 billion, caused massive shortages in social housing and increased inequality, said the Common Wealth think tank.

The property project, introduced by Margaret Thatcher, will be 45 years old in October, said Melissa York in The Times, and its "effects still reverberate through the housing market".

'Stark divide'

Right to Buy allowed council-house tenants to buy the homes they lived in and forced local authorities to sell the properties on request at a discount. It transformed the way Britain "viewed housing", from "a right under the social contract between citizen and state to a commodity to be coveted and traded".

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The scheme allowed many baby boomers a "foothold" on the property ladder because they were able to own their own properties, and in addition "free to make home improvements" that could increase the value of that home.

Now, the over-60s control more than half of the UK's housing wealth and the over-75s control almost a quarter, and there's a "stark wealth divide" between the children of people who were able to "jump on to the property ladder" in the 1980s and the "less-fortunate offspring" of those who "missed the boat".

Between 1980 and 2021, 1.8 million households in England purchased a home from their local authority using Right to Buy. The plan "achieved its goal of getting more people on the housing ladder in its former years" said Rachel Mortimer in The Telegraph, but its "popularity has waned since".

Substantial decline

The programme has "dramatically depleted" Britain's affordable housing stock, said Richard Partington in The Guardian, because the homes sold through Right to Buy were not replaced. And after "rising for decades", home ownership rates have dropped since 2004, and "collapsed" among young adults.

Right to Buy was not a bad idea overall, but the "underlying ideology" has "led to the problems we're in now", said Paul McNamee in the Big Issue. It's resulted in a "lack of suitable housing stock" with councils increasingly spending their "dwindling income" on helping people who are homeless, or at risk of becoming homeless.

Thatcher used the policy to "deplete" the country's social housing because she did not "replace the houses sold at a discount", said The Canary. There's been a "substantial decline" in the number of social houses since 1980 and the Labour Party is "doing little to fix the issue".