Right to buy - grossly unfair on private renters and private home owners

[Winterday1991]

Is it just me or is RTB grossly unfair. People that already have cheap subsidised rent and a secure tenancy can get over to £105k off the market value of their council property.

This seems so unfair to us who have to brought in the private market at full market price and private renters who often do not have secure long term tenancies. Why should the public subsidise this?

It is if you are well off. You take something you don’t need. Happy for those who need social housing to have it. HAs borrow money to acquire and build homes. Issues they face are ability to borrow and find land. Using assets fairly should be a very important aspect of HA delivery of goals for the government. Of course they won’t tackle this so we don’t have enough homes. We don’t build them either. Unless we use a variety of strategies we get no further forward.

I don’t agree with RTB but I understand that it’s some peoples only chance of ever getting onto the property ladder.

But there is absolutely no way that you should be allowed to own multiple properties, rent out rooms as air B&Bs, be earning hundreds of thousands etc and still be allowed a council home.

The issue isn’t people who are on a low income and can’t get a mortgage in the normal way.
Its the people who take the piss out of the system.

I asked on here about buying my council home a few years ago (I wasn’t in a position to do it at the time but it was more to understand it for the future) and posters were telling me to buy it and then get a buy to let property or to move and rent it out etc.
A poster was on a few months ago saying she’d inherited a house and loads of people told her not to give up her council home.

I am always really shocked at so many MNers lack of morals when it comes to taking advantage of the system like benefit fraud or RTB.

No wonder there is such a shortage in such an housing.

You clearly don’t understand what a subsidy means. It couldn’t be much clearer.

all of the costs of providing the social housing need to be met from the rental income received from them.

That means social housing washes its own face. No subsidy from any other source of funds.

Apologies I live in Ireland so not 100% familiar with your system but they are very similar.

If the tenant pays their own rent in full, as a tenant of a local
authority, they are paying the full rent charged by the local authority
for the occupation of the dwelling. Social housing rents are well below
market rents, but are not subsidised rents.
If it is well below market rent then it is subsidised! Kind of splitting hairs there. My point is that social housing is a very finite resource at a time when there is massive need. Housing waiting lists are sky high and many people on them are unlikely to ever get offered a property. I think it is crucial access to these properties are based on need not when or how long you have your tenancy. In Ireland people who are on housing waiting lists have the option for housing assistance payment (HAP). They source a property privately and the council pay a percentage of the rent. Unfortunately as private rents increase many still can't afford them even with HAP. I work in the community sector and the amount of families I am working with that are in emergency accommodation or at risk of homelessness is scary, yet there are plenty of social housing 3/4-bed properties in the area with sole occupancy, makes no sense 🤔

A social housing property is to support those most in need of accommodation it should never be a longterm solution for that person when and if their situation improves they should move on.

Given that this is MN and £50k is "not enough to live on" according to some posts on other threads I've read, how much money do you think people should have before they are booted out of their home for having the audacity to be earning above NMW?

If it is well below market rent then it is subsidised!

You clearly don’t understand the meaning of subsidy. The housing provider quoted above clearly states there is no subsidy.

If you want people to give up their council house then maybe we have to change their mindset. If I remember correctly the original idea was to "tide people over" until they could afford their own property. My grandparents lived in a council house just after the war and when they could afford they bought privately as did my uncle and aunt.

People have now changed and those who can afford to buy privately even without RTB don't want to and I don't see how we can make them

I'm not in favour or RTB but I can understand it and I can understand people not wanting to downsize or move out from where they have brought their families up. I don't have answers.

Although I did buy an ex council house (to let out) I think it's a really poor decision to sell them off. So many were sold on when Thatcher was in. We need social housing!

People have now changed and those who can afford to buy privately even without RTB don't want to and I don't see how we can make them.

This hasn’t been helped by how much smaller houses are now. A three bed council property built in the 50’s is so much more spacious than three beds on newer estates plus costs less to buy. It’s easy to see why people would exercise their right to buy ( for those who have that preserved).

I have just left a rented property.

My landlords grandparents purchased it under right to buy for £45,000.

I paid over £60,000 in rent and often paid for repairs because he & the agent didn't care.

My landlord inherited the property with no outstanding debt.

Property is now worth £110,000.

Landlord evicted me under a section 21 stating he wanted to sell.

He re-rented the property a month after I left with a 50% increase in the rent.

And there we have it!! Social housing bought to make money?
How can you disagree with the principle, when you're profiting?
Buying ones own social property to live in is one thing - admitting it was bought to make money is another

@TTortiemiaw I said it was an ex council house but it had been in the private domain for decades before I bought it for a family to rent cheaply (because they cannot afford market rates). I disagree with social housing being sold on.

*family member

Depends on the area, when we moved into our council house you could earn up to 35k, we applied because it was the 4th time in 6 years we'd had to move due to LL deciding to sell up

Not sure how much you can earn these days but I know people who have only had to go into temp accommodation for a couple of months before being given a house

So why didn’t Labour abolish it, when they had 13 years in which to do it?

I agree.

If a new social housing property had been built to replace every home sold, I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it, tbh.

Because the last 'Labour' government fundamentally continued to operate on Conservative principles. Also, because when it comes to RTB, it won a lot of votes for Thatcher because people naively took it at face value, as a positive thing which benefited them. Which it did in the very short term. Had Blair's slightly less Tory than actual Tory government abolished it, they would have lost votes and they knew it, basically because individuals (understandably) don't think long term, they think about what will benefit them now. It would take a pretty brave government to convince individuals that something that clearly and obviously benefits them in the here and now should be abolished because it has no benefit to the population at large.

And, let's make no bones about it, social housing is a thorn in any government's side. It is time and resource heavy, and the provision is easy to criticise. Increasing rents to match higher costs of resources to manage social housing will be viewed negatively, however much lower than private the rent remains. How it is distributed, criteria required to be granted social housing will always be a political hot potato, like the NHS. RBS is a convenient tool to.phase out social housing by simply offloading and not replacing. Using homes available for rent in .the private sector as social housing makes more sense to government because it massively reduces the admin by paying the rent to a private homeowner who remains responsible for the property.

Mainly because it was written in to people's tenancy agreements the "Right to Buy". It would have been a legal mess to try and get rid of. As far as I am aware though it is no longer a right for new tenancy agreements so will eventually peter out. When I worked in the sector at the beginning of the noughties, councils were transferring many of their properties and tenancies to Housing Associations and there was uproar over the RTB because Housing Associations did not offer this. In most cases I think they had to honour it for transferring tenants as in like for like

So why didn’t Labour abolish it, when they had 13years in which to do it?

Hadn't it originally been a proposal of theirs?

RTB was ok, but it would only have worked if councils/HAs replaced the properties.

Governments stopped them - so now we have a chronic housing social housing shortage.🙁

My council still does right to buy and our council is also in the process of building lots and lots of council houses and affordable housing. It's a very modest town in the nw but we have had 200 new council and HA houses ( In mixed developments of 1500 ish) in the last 2-3 years with another phase due to be completed soon. The council also actively purchases properties on the open market to use as council housing. My DH purchased his council flat a good few years ago and paid £19k for a property valued at £63k. He really struggled to reconcile the choice to purchase with his political beliefs but his rent was £400 a month and his mortgage was £200 for ten years so it was a no brainier really. Neither of us ever expected to own a proper so for us it's amazing.

Originally receipts for council houses sold could not be spent on building more houses. It’s only recently that has changed.

Social housing was actually being sold well before Thatcher. A dd bought a house that the former owners had bought from the council in 1971 - as dh found after a good old nose on the Land Reg.

Dd paid almost exactly 100 times what they did.

It's a poke the bear thread. You can always tell when they come out with tripe like 'subsidised rents'. Not worth the energy.

You are not being unreasonable!!
There's also cases of people who have bought their home with right to buy then they rent it out privately for double or even triple what the neighbours pay with their council tenancy 😡
Fr imagine working your butt off to pay over a grand in rent for your apartment while your neighbour is some crackhead bum paying 500 for the same damn thing.