Councils demand Right to Buy reform to tackle the housing crisis

Reply to the comment left by Reluctant Landlord at 16/02/2024 - 10:54
Not true. Only since the 2022-23 tax year have councils been allowed to keep 100% of their Right to Buy revenue with five years to spend it. Normally councils only receive around 15% of the house value because the remainder goes to central government and they are specifically prohibited from using that 15% for building new stock.

The fallacy of RTB denial is the idea that it would have made any difference.
The now owners of the former council house would still otherwise be council tenants, and supply for the parabolic increase in immigrants would still be the same. RTB fails if the former tenants sell the house, party on the profits, and turn up again cap in hand. But there is only conjecture to suggest this is the case, with people holding onto the idea that RTB owners should still behave as tenants, not allowed to move house, and certainly not allowed to sell to a landlord.
The flipside to this argument is that the council tenant won't live forever, so the supply would at some distant future point become available again, but I think supporting people to transit away from being subjects of the state is worth the investment. Socialism is best for countries with a large oil supply, otherwise it eventually becomes apparent that somebody needs to pay for it, as we are now finding out.

Reply to the comment left by Desmond at 18/02/2024 - 08:17
Right to Buy has cost the taxpayer more than keeping the stock, and the housing benefit bill has skyrocketed. Supporting Right to Buy makes no sense from the perspective of saving taxpayer money.

Socialism requires the state or common ownership of the means of production. Council housing can exist in almost any economic system, and since the UK has never been socialist it has always existed here under capitalism.

Reply to the comment left by Lisa008 at 17/02/2024 - 14:08Lisa, in the bad old days council housing was often little better than a slum, with tenants in securely tenured, poorly maintained accommodation, often unemployed with zero ambition or pride and little incentive to look after the property and little to no accountability to the landlord, aka the council. Antisocial behaviour was often rife and some areas were used as unofficial dumping grounds for problem tenants. You could always tell the council houses just by seeing gardens that were used as junkyards, something no self-respecting owner would do. I used to live in a road that was flanked on either side by such housing, so I could see this first hand. They were also often loss-making due to the subsidised nature of the business and could sometimes be in such dire need of repair that the commercial value of the property was close to zero, as was the case in one place where I lived and worked.
The intended consequence of RTB was to correct all these problems by turning tenants into homeowners who would take pride in their homes and look after them, do the repairs themselves and save councils a ton of money. This would then create a win-win situation instead of tenants being held back by complete lack of agency and responsibility. To achieve this, they were offered substantial discounts that were hard to refuse, and councils I believe were not allowed to reinvest the money into repeating the failed council housing experiment. The ultimate goal was to remove or greatly reduce the need for council housing altogether, and all the problems that went with it.
At first there was great enthusiasm and many people took up the offer, but inevitable decided after a while that they wanted or needed to move on. Many of the properties were then acquired by would be landlords as they were of course generally cheaper than buying property in other areas, and the demand for rental property never actually went away.

Reply to the comment left by Peter Merrick at 19/02/2024 - 08:11
Council estates only became dumping grounds for problem families in the late 1970s and 80s due to lax allocation policies and poor maintenance. In the 1950s and 60s the policies were quite strict, with working tenants being required and even cleaning windows once a week.

Reply to the comment left by L G at 19/02/2024 - 14:51
Couldn't agree more. I lived in a council house until mid 70's - yes there were a few rough patches but the estates mainly a nice place to live. In fact many people in council houses installed their own central heating (as we did, we got permission from the council to do it). My father used to reguarily win the yearly municiple gardening competion. The thing that started going wrong was RTB, people bought their properties and couldn't afford to maintain them or sold them after a perod of time to BTL landlords who couldn't care less who they put in them. Its even worse now as landlords are turning large council houses into HMOs with no thought to the consequences - still money talks (I had 18 properties but not on a council housing estate)

Reply to the comment left by L G at 18/02/2024 - 21:53
The social state as a whole has skyrocketed, not due to RTB, but rather to the broader economic impacts of globalisation, immigration, wealth inequality, economic inactivity, ageing population, state largesse etc., all of which link together.
On socialism vs capitalism I would say the twain always meets, but we each may wish to see more of the other. Observing the Renters Reform Bill, an anti-landlord charity/media lobby, Section 24, rent cap North of the border etc., I wouldn't call this a capitalist system.

Reply to the comment left by Desmond at 20/02/2024 - 13:10
None of those factors you mention detract from the capitalist nature of the system because they do not propose to socialise housing. All they are doing is tinkering with the rules. They might be bad rules that we should oppose but they aren't socialism. In fact, capitalism is typically characterised by a high level of behind-the-scenes regulation under the guise of being a "free market" (an impossibility anyway since modern markets are a creation of the state in the first place). My issue was with the nomenclature, not the criticism of those things.

If tenants didn’t buy their council properties, there’d be more council tenants as well as more council houses. The overall impact would be neglible, at best.

The real answer is to manage population growth, build more houses and encourage better use of the current t housing stock.

Managing population growth could be accomplished by managing net migration, removing the incentive for everybody, including benefit claimants, to have more than two children, introducing a right to die for the terminally ill.

Increasing housing stock could be done much more quickly by making better use of factory built homes. Most have stayed in mobile homes/caravans that are perfectly suited for everyday living.

Using housing stock more efficiently could be done by increasing the Rent a Room allowance and extending the bedroom tax to all properties. Why should an 80 year old live in a 4 bedroom house but only pay 75% of the council tax? They should pay 125% in order to encourage them to downsize.

Reply to the comment left by Cider Drinker at 21/02/2024 - 11:46
I think the rent a room scheme is a good way forward, no AST and you only have to give 2 weeks notice - having said that will Gove or Labour bugger that up as well