This morning’s reports that Angela Rayner is preparing to slash the Right to Buy discount will naturally be greeted with dismay in Conservative circles. Per the Daily Mail:
“Ms Rayner is now set to cut the discount available to social housing tenants from a maximum of 70 per cent to just 25 per cent. Tenants will also have to have lived in the homes for up to a decade before gaining the right to buy – more than treble the current three-year limit.”
In truth, however, Right to Buy had foundered long before now. In the parts of the country where it would be most useful (i.e. London and the South East), house prices have outpaced incomes by such an extent that even the full discount is increasingly insufficient to bring ownership within reach of public housing tenants.
What could the Tories have done about that during 14 years in power? Setting aside fantasies about tackling the housing crisis more broadly, the obvious solution was the Adam Smith Institute’s ‘Flexible Right to Buy’, under which tenants are advanced the discount in cash to help buy another, more affordable property, after which their current one is sold.
For anyone looking to revive the Right to Buy dream, this was about as good as it got. Emily Fielder set out the benefits on this site last year:
“Workers could also be better matched with jobs. New buyers or tenants who work in higher-wage industries may be better able than the existing tenants to take advantage of jobs in areas where property prices are higher. Reducing some of the friction in the labour markets would serve to boost productivity and by extension wages.”
Not only would it help a new generation of people achieve home-ownership and move into a property and place more suited to their tastes and needs, but it may too have helped lance the boil of growing, and justified, resentment amongst hard-pressed younger workers of the social housing situation in places like London, where they are forced further and further out by higher and higher rents and prices whilst their taxes subsidise housing in Zone 1 for other people.
Best of all, each council property sold under the scheme would pay for the discount several times over (the ASI estimated £62 billion for the Exchequer) – profits that could be spent on new public housing and tackling the laundry list of repairs needed in remaining stock.
But nothing came of it, and without a strong pipeline of people benefitting from the existing policy it was that much easier for Labour (which is fundamentally much happier with the idea of mass state tenantry) to pare the policy down, if not yet kill it.
Like last week’s reports that Bridget Phillipson is reviewing the funding of dozens of “planned free schools that are still in the “pipeline” phase”, Rayner’s announcement is a salutary reminder to the Conservative Party to finish its revolutions. Like Right to Buy, free schools were about fundamentally changing the structure of a sector or service and the public’s relationship with it; like Right to Buy, it had its season in the sun before the Tories seemed to stop paying attention.
A reminder of what the other side actually want to do with schools and housing is, or at least could be, a useful jolt to Conservative thinking. And having the slate wiped clean is also a good excuse to have another crack at something we originally went about in the wrong way, such as railway privatisation.
Yet the impact of these other policies pales compared to what can be achieved with housing. The impact of Right to Buy has been enormous, and sometimes crops up in unexpected places: during the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, campaigners reported that “there’s no firmer ‘No’ than a bought council house”.
If Flexible Right to Buy had kicked off in 2010, it could have made a lot of money and created a lot of winners. Instead, the Conservatives spent 14 years coasting, offering lots of warm words on the principle of RTB but doing nothing to adapt it to modern conditions. Perhaps they thought Labour would be as allergic to rolling back Tory policies as the Tories tend to be to rolling back Labour ones. Another useful lesson to take: they’re not.