Tuesday 02 June 2026 5:45 am
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Monday 01 June 2026 2:40 pm
A residential tower block in an area of Lambeth with a high concentration of social housing on August 28, 2014 in London, (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
Labour leadership contenders’ claims that Right to Buy is to blame for the housing crisis are absurd, says Ben HopkinsonLast week in a 5,000 word polemic, Tony Blair accused the Labour government of being parked firmly in the party’s ‘soft left’ comfort zone. Perhaps nothing reflects this more than the leadership contender’s short-sighted clamour for social housing at the expense of a functioning housing market.Andy Burnham, in his response to Blair, went as far as claiming that the Right to Buy, under which council tenants can eventually purchase their home, is the root cause of today’s housing crisis. Keir Starmer too has announced more restrictions on the Right to Buy. Under these changes, a combination of stopping any sales in the countryside, preventing tenants from using their Right to Buy for the first decade of their tenancy, and exempting any property built within the past 35 years will strip the rights of more social tenants to buy their own home.The Right to Buy is a rare policy that has been an unmitigated success. Over 2m households have used it as a means to own their home. These families gained a stake in their local community, which previously had been out of reach. They were then free to do what they wanted with the property. They could customise their home to their taste, move easily if they wanted, and could pass the asset on to their children.Right to Buy benefitted both the families who became owners, and the wider housing market by allowing more properties to be bought and sold, rather than being handed out by government bureaucrats. Weakening the state drives the soft left madOf course it was the weakening of the role of the state and the empowerment of the individual that drove the soft left mad. They have always blamed the transfer of social homes to the free market for Britain’s housing crisis. Simply put, this is nonsense. The UK does not have a shortage of social homes; it has a shortage of homes regardless of tenure type.The UK has the fourth highest percentage of social housing in the OECD, which is double the EU average. But compared to the typical Western European country’s total homes per capita, it is 6.5m homes short. And Right to Buy homes do not disappear once they’ve been bought by the tenants, despite what ministers say in press releases.The failure to build, not the success of Right to Buy, is the true cause of the housing crisis. And the government’s obsession with requiring large amounts of subsidised housing to be funded by any development is actively making it harder to build the homes Britain needs.One of the most common complaints about the Right to Buy is that it gives tenants a discount. But this ignores the far larger subsidy already built into every social home, long before any discount is offered.In London, for example, it costs between £400,000 and £950,000 to develop a new social rent property (using the GLA’s 2021 development-cost figures, uprated for construction inflation). Yet once built, that asset generates very little for the taxpayer. The average social rent in the capital is around £7,900 a year, and after maintenance and management costs, the net present value of the rental income is on the order of £100,000.
