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5 March 2013updated 26 Sep 2015 3:01pm

Right-to-buy houses are now just owned by private landlords

"In one London borough almost half of ex-council properties are now sub-let to tenants."

By Alex Hern

The Mirror‘s Nick Sommerlad has a great piece of investigative journalism today, looking at who now owns the council houses sold off under Thatcher.

Sommerlad writes:

A third of ex-council homes sold in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher were now owned by private landlords. In one London borough almost half of ex-council properties are now sub-let to tenants.

Tycoon Charles Gow and his wife own at least 40 ex-council flats on one South London estate. His father Ian Gow was one of Mrs Thatcher’s top aides and was Housing Minister during the peak years of right-to-buy.

Right-to-buy was intended to create a nation of home-owners (we actually already had a nation of home-owners, but we wanted more home-owners). There’s competing evidence about the efficacy of that move; the Conservative belief was that owning your home gives you a greater sense of community, a motivation to treat your abode and your area well, and a leg-up out of poverty with your new-found equity.

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The darker side of it is that debt is historically an important tool of control. It’s important to keep your head down at work, not go on strike, and pay off your mortgage if losing your job won’t just lose your house, but will saddle you with thousands of pounds of debt.

But whatever the supposed positives of right-to-buy are, they rely on the people who bought the houses actually living in them. In hindsight, it appears that the policy was just a transfer of Britain’s housing stock from social landlords to private ones. It’s hard not to see that as the beginning of the problems we’re still experiencing now.

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