In a passionate article in the Guardian today LINK Aditya Chakrabortty reveals that Right to Buy applications rose 7,000% in Brent ahead of the deadline for discount change in November 2024.
This was the highest in London and represents a major loss of council housing thus contributing to the housing crisis. Before the deadline of 21st November the discount on the London market price could be as much as £136,400 reduced to c£16,000 after the deadline.
9 comments:
So our new Labour government has encouraged this?
Presumably an unintended consequence of setting a deadline after which a much lower discount would apply.
Which is why they should have scrapped Right to Buy completely rather than fiddle around at the edges.
Yes. A good change of policy, but badly thought out implementation. It would have been better to announce the change as applying to any right to buy application made after the date of the announcement.
In view of the shortage of affordable social housing, which is worse than when I was working for housing associations in the 1970s, a better policy would have been to scrap right to buy altogether. But that would have meant upsetting Labour's YIMBY faction, who seem to believe that everyone has a dream of owning their own home, when so many just want a decent home that they can afford to rent.
But why do it?
See here comment from Cllr Butt:
"The Leader of Brent Council, Cllr Muhammed Butt, told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “The amount of money we spend on temporary accommodation is huge. It will need more than just the council to do something about it. I don’t think we should have sold council homes, it’s easy to say that [in hindsight] but we are now seeing the impacts. The cost of building now is becoming horrific. Developers have gone out of business, housing associations are merging.”"
https://harrowonline.org/2025/02/14/brent-council-spends-100k-per-day-on-temporary-accommodation/
He's been Leader of Brent Counvil for years - why hasn't he put pressure on the government to stop the sale of council housing???
Agree, anonymous 11:44. But he also says `with hindsight'. Many pointed out from the start of Right to Buy that this would be the result. The likes of Mo Butt refused to accept this.
How much hindsight do you need??? Thatcher introduced the policy in 1980 and the Labour Governments since then could have reversed the policy but chose not to.
Anonymous (14 February at 11:44) shares a quote from Brent Council's Leader including 'I don't think we should have sold council homes.'
Selling council homes was a national government policy, but the Cecil Avenue site, currently under construction, is a Brent Council project, on the former Copland School site which the Council already owned.
Brent received full planning consent for that scheme in February 2021, and could have gone ahead and built it then as an all council homes development, when interest rates and building costs were lower than they are now.
Instead, the Regeneration Lead Member for the project, Shama Tatler, with support from the Leader, decided that the Council should seek a developer partner.
This not only delayed building work for several years, but meant we have ended up with a project which will see 150 of the 237 homes on the site sold privately by Wates (along with, on the latest known plans, 3 of the council homes sold privately), and even then not all of the remaining council homes for affordable rent!
And what explanation for this did Cllr. Tatler give for why there were not more council homes provided by her Cecil Avenue project, when questioned by a Scrutiny Committee? That the Council couldn't afford to provide more, because they had to buy the land! That was untrue, as I showed in a guest post at the time (April 2024):
https://wembleymatters.blogspot.com/2024/04/regeneration-at-scrutiny-meeting-truth.html
Selling Council homes is one side of the housing crisis. Failing to build the desperately needed affordable Council homes that you could have built (and had families living in by now, rather than late 2026) is another side, and Cllr Muhammed Butt must share some of the responsibility for that.
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