Recently, Waverley’s Senior Accountant confirmed that the Council is buying back former council properties purchased by private owners under the Right-to-Buy scheme, as it has first refusal.
She confirmed that some “open market purchases” are currently underway to help provide housing for the homeless and refugees. These use the Local Authority Housing Fund, with the central government providing 40% of the necessary funding.
Here at the Waverley Web, we are totally discombobulated about what exactly this means.
Is ‘Your Waverley’ and other local authorities, actually buying back homes at market value they sold at a discount to former tenants under the RTB scheme at market value, to rent them out again to new Tenants who can then buy the homes at a discount under the RTB scheme?
What planet are we on, Planet Zonk?
The right to buy is one of the biggest acts of privatisation ever undertaken, transferring £40 billion in the last 42 years directly to the Treasury. This money was never seen again, lost in a soup of national debt repayments and tax cuts. It has served as a way of funnelling money and power away from the local authorities, who once built and maintained millions of homes.
Forty-two years after “the property-owning democracy” Margaret Thatcher craved is receding from view. When RTB was launched as part of the Housing Act 1980, 55% of householders were homeowners. The figure peaked at 72% in the early 00s but currently stands at 65%. Meanwhile, council housing has decreased, too. 1979 there were 6.5m council homes; now there are 2.2m, while 4.4m households rent privately, twice as many as 15 years ago.
During his premiership, Boris Johnson announced that RTB would be extended to tenants of housing associations – not-for-profit organisations that sell homes to about 2.5 million people at rents of up to 80% of the market rate.
Polly Neate, CEO of the housing charity Shelter, said extending the RTB when the waiting list for social housing in England stands at 1.6m is a…
“baffling, unworkable and a dangerous gimmick”.
Although RTB has succeeded spectacularly as a political slogan, its benefits have been starkly unequal. While an older generation of working—and lower-middle-class people gained their first big asset upon buying council homes in the 1980s, millions of mostly younger people have now been forced into insecure, grotty, privately rented accommodation.
In England, RTB is implicated at every stage of a housing crisis that has been 40 years in the making.
The net result is that local authorities can do relatively little about their local housing problems without deferring to central government.
Example
Phil Salter, a 79-year-old retired carpenter in Cornwall, bought his council house in Devon in the early 1980s for £17,000. When it was valued at £80,000 in 1989, he sold it and used the equity towards a £135,000 fisherman’s cottage in St Mawes. Now, it’s valued at £1.1m. “I was very grateful to Margaret Thatcher,” he said.
A combination of low levels of housebuilding, “land banking” by property developers, and the equity pumped into the housing market by newly flush right-to-buy sellers drove house prices upwards while wages failed to keep up. As the first wave of right-to-buy beneficiaries sold up and moved on, ex-council homes entered the private rental market in ever greater numbers. Former right-to-buy properties now comprise 40% of all available private rented housing across England, reaching a staggering 70.9% in Milton Keynes.
Dorine, a 30-year-old in Crawley, lived with her husband, three small children, and two teenage sisters in a poky, crumbling, two-bedroom ex-council flat now owned by a private landlord in India. Universal credit paid most of their rent, but when their benefit was suddenly cut because Dorine’s husband worked an hour’s overtime one week, they went into arrears on a flat covered in black mould that its owner had never even visited.
Some people did very well from RTB, but for Society, the cost has been high. Most of the properties that were bought under right to buy came back on the market as private rented, and now we’re seeing the fallout.”
This was one of Mrs Thatcher’s predictable major errors where many profited vastly at the public expense. It also raises the question why are illegal immigrants or if “refugees” being accommodated in Waverley one of the most expensive areas to live in the UK. The UN refugee obligation for housing only applies to refugees and it is under the control of public authorities requiring “treatment as favourable as possible.” The refugee also has the obligation to abide by the law and regulations of the nation that grants them asylum which maybe a temporary status.