Considering its impact in previous decades, the likely return of the Right to Buy as a major feature of housing policy has attracted surprisingly little attention.
True the government is doing its best to keep what it calls the 'reinvigoration' of RTB as low key as possible after publishing a consultation paper just days before Christmas. But the fact is, once consultations close later this week, ministers are almost certain to go ahead with raising discounts in an attempt to entice more council tenants to join the property ladder.
At present, councils are only selling about 2,600 homes per year through RTB. By offering tenants discounts of up to £50,000, David Cameron hopes to sell about 100,000 homes over the next few years although there is no precise date for meeting this target.
But is this good news for council tenants now or in the future and what does it mean for the housing sector as a whole? The main criticism of RTB in the 1980s and 1990s, when annual sales sometimes exceeded 100,000, was that councils were not allowed to keep receipts to build new social housing.
This time around, the government is promising that homes sold off will be replaced on a one-for-one basis. But they will not be replaced with new social housing but rather with homes that will be let at up to 80% of local market rents - so-called affordable renting. Thus councils will be expected to join housing associations in borrowing money that can be paid for using future rent receipts. Meanwhile, the overall number of homes available for poorer familes will be further depleted.
The government estimates that about 300,000 households renting from councils or housing associations are eligible for the RTB and can afford to buy their home because the head of the household is in work. Some, it says, will be better off paying a mortgage than rent. But as the past few years have proved, paying off a mortgage can sometimes cause major difficulties, especially for families on limited incomes.
Increased RTB sales will, argues the government, boost economic growth by stimulating house building. It is highly likely that many of the extra sales will come in areas such as London where the discount cap is being raised threefold. But these are also the areas where it generally costs more to build new homes and where the shortage of social rented housing is often most acute.
It is not clear at this stage whether individual councils will keep all or the majority of receipts from RTB sales to invest in new housing, or whether there will be some form of national system for distributing the money raised. Therefore, at the very least, we should be in for a major row over the true meaning of localism, if not over the wisdom of selling off much-needed social housing with no clear policy for replacing it.
It is not clear at this stage whether individual councils will keep all or the majority of receipts from RTB sales to invest in new housing, or whether there will be some form of national system for distributing the money raised. Therefore, at the very least, we should be in for a major row over the true meaning of localism, if not over the wisdom of selling off much-needed social housing with no clear policy for replacing it.
