The Labour Deputy Prime Minister is considering cutting the Right to Buy discount despite personally benefiting £48,500 from it.
The UK Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is reportedly preparing to overhaul Margaret Thatcher’s iconic Right to Buy scheme.
The scheme, which was introduced in the 1980s, allowed millions of council tenants to purchase their homes at a significant discount, becoming a key pillar of Thatcher’s legacy.
Rayner, a long-time critic of the policy despite having personally benefited from it herself in the past, is considering cutting the discounts currently offered to tenants under the scheme. Supporters of Right to Buy argue that the scheme empowers individuals by giving them a stake in their own homes, while critics claim it exacerbates inequality and limits access to affordable housing.
In 2007, Angela Rayner purchased her former council house in Stockport, Greater Manchester, for £79,000 through the Right to Buy scheme, benefiting from a 25% discount. She later sold the property for a profit of £48,500 more than the original purchase price. Now, in her role as housing secretary, she is weighing options to reduce or potentially even scrap the discounts, a move that could drastically change how public housing tenants access homeownership and anger council tenants across the country.
Shadow housing secretary Kemi Badenoch said it was “no coincidence” that Labour “wants to destroy one of Margaret Thatcher’s most transformative policies”. She added:
“If Angela Rayner was serious about improving people’s lives, she would be finding ways to increase house-building, rather than cutting a programme that gets people on the housing ladder and gives them a stake in their communities.”
Former Home Secretary James Cleverly agrees saying:
“Margaret Thatcher gave ordinary people the opportunity to have the security and freedom of owning a home of their own. Angela Rayner benefited personally from the scheme, bought her council house and made a tidy profit. Now she wants to take it away.”
However, Labour argue that the scheme has led to a chronic shortage of social housing saying many homes sold under the scheme were never replaced, leading to long waiting lists for affordable housing.
In a report published this weekend, London’s Southwark Council has accused the Right to Buy Scheme of contributing to a £2.2 billion shortfall in local authority accounts. The council, which houses over 1,500 asylum seekers has claimed the scheme is worsening Britain’s housing crisis and taking away housing from those who need it in their area. They said the scheme presented “a serious problem for the sustainability of England’s council housing.”
Local Southwark resident Steve James snapped back saying:
“So do these councils just want to stop local Brits from buying their homes and give all the housing to asylum seekers and illegal migrants? I can’t believe the hypocrisy of Angela Rayner. She even made money selling her council house on and now wants to take the opportunity away from us Brits.”
Another resident (name withheld) told the Conservative Post:
“While the boat loads arrive daily, the young lose their chances of ever owning their own homes. Labour voted against stopping the boats. They voted against and stopped Rwanda. They need to turn the tap off on illegal immigration once and for all and stop giving our council houses away to people who haven’t paid into the pot. It just stops people like my son from owning his own home. I think Rayner is a hypocrite.”
However, those in favour of cutting the discounts say Rayner’s proposal would potentially slow down the depletion of the social housing stock by reducing the number of tenants able to afford buying their council homes. In the last financial year, 10,896 homes were sold under the Right to Buy scheme, while only 3,447 were replaced, according to official data. This resulted in a net loss of 7,449 social homes. Since 1991, the scheme has contributed to an overall net reduction of 24,000 social housing units.
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