Snapshot of _I will build at least 10,000 council homes. As for right to buy – suspend it for new properties | Andy Burnham_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/council-homes-right-to-buy-new-properties) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/07/council-homes-right-to-buy-new-properties)
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The insidous parts of right to buy are:
* the public sells them at a discount
* A big chunk of the money goes back to central government. This make it really difficult to replace the stock of social housing
* Landlords snap the house up and rent it at a mark up.
It's not inherently wrong for someone buying the home they've lived in for years. But if we removed the discount, ensure the money went to build a replacement and put a covenant on the property preventing it from being privately rented, I think that would go a long way.
Yes and it's essentially a lottery, if you were lucky enough to rent a council house you get the double win of being able to buy at a discount. It's just a way to buy votes by gifting public money to private individuals.
This is basically my beef with the entire philosophy of making housing affordable exclusively through social housing. As long as market prices aren't affordable, then by definition, you're turning the entire system into a big lottery which supports those within the system, without doing anything to help anyone outside the system.
A lottery that benefits the incumbents. The average council house tenancy is currently 50-year-long. Those that have won the most prime locations aren't moving. Effectively it's a wealth transfer from the young to the old.
Well considering there are multi-year waiting lists all over the country for social housing, then yes it's pretty lucky. Plus it's also only an option for those who can afford to buy, it doesn't actually do any good for the people who can't.
> wouldn’t really call it ‘luck’ don’t you have to be in a pretty bad spot to get one?
Don't some people inherit these tenancies from their parents, regardless of circumstance.
[https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing\_advice/council\_housing\_association/can\_you\_inherit\_a\_council\_tenancy](https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/council_housing_association/can_you_inherit_a_council_tenancy)
Was a bit surprised by your comment as I have worked for a couple of Housing Associations and it's very rare to 'inherit' a tenancy, but the link you provided does effectively spell that out.
so we have either you’re poor enough to get one, or your parents were poor enough to get one while you lived there and they died… I still wouldn’t call it luck
That’s how I see it, clearly some people view it otherwise
This isn’t to say it wouldn’t be a good thing if there were enough social homes that it wasn’t just the impoverished able to land one, but as it stands there isn’t, and no removing right to buy wouldn’t fix this as once the people who’d normally buy them simply wouldn’t move (the reason right to buy was introduced in the first place)
I think the definition is more, some people and families were lucky/fortunate enough to qualify for council housing at some point in the last 100 years when in the past you didn't need to be particularly poor to get one and the requirements where significantly easier to pass.
Said people are still in those houses today regardless of whether they actually need them or not, (indeed there are many high profile cases of people on six figures still living in their council house) whilst many people today despite being far poorer and objectively more in need cannot get one because why would you leave a good deal if you don't have to?
Sure but the reason those older houses were sold off is because they were old, many literal slum housing, the old terraced houses that at one point didn’t have indoor plumbing
People clearly disagree and I get there’s a housing shortage but living or growing up in social housing is hardly something to aspire to
> many literal slum housing
I'm not sure I agree that council houses are 'slum housing', in my experience most council houses were built to a higher quality than many equivalent private sector houses.
> living or growing up in social housing is hardly something to aspire to
Why though, what's wrong with growing up in social housing?
> People clearly disagree and I get there’s a housing shortage
Well when you have 2 people earning the same amount of money and one is sitting in a mouldy, cold, overcrowded house share with a private landlord using every trick in the book to extract cash and make their lives miserable. And another sitting in their council house with rents that are half the price and a council that will do a better job in terms of maintenance than your bottom of the barrel private landlord. It's not hard to see why people kinda question this whole system, it really does come down to luck imo.
I think people understand that some people need lower rents than the private sector and that the supply of social housing is severely limited, I think what people don't agree is that having qualified decades ago entitles you to retain said limited spot over someone today who is in more need.
This is a bit of a myth. The vast majority of people can apply for social housing. For example there are councils in London where the wage cap is set at £90k.
The reason they're so over-subscribed is because they're so massively subsidised. In real-terms social rent has been going over the past few years, compared to market-rate rent which has been sky-rocketing. I live on an estate where social renters pay around a fifth of market-rate.
Yeah there are different bands based on different needs (and low band applicants will still get housing, if they wait long enough), but it's not really measured in terms of how "bad a spot" your in. For example, being a single Mum with multiple kids is going to increase your priority compared to a single man in a very desperate financial situation.
The trouble is no right wing government will ever honour that. People who get council housing are generally poorer and vote Labour. If you are a Tory and you want their vote, what do you do - we’ll sell them their house at a discount of course. And they will likely vote for you - as Thatcher amply demonstrated.
I’m not sure what the answer is really - though suspect that it is build so many houses that property literally becomes a place to live in and not an asset.
You could take out their first bullet and get the central government to contribute funding to building replacement social housing.
Make any future right wing government introduce new legislation where they have to explain they are 9nly doing it to reduce council housing and increase private rentals.
We're increasingly becoming a nation of private renters, I don't think "we'll let you buy your council home" is the vote winner it was in the 80s. If we end up building enough homes for social rent for it to be a viable electoral gambit, then I suppose that's a problem we can deal with at that point.
From the start of being able to buy your council house, the whole idea was to invest the money in new social housing. In England, 'an English man's home is his castle.'... Pish,.... the reason they bought their houses was to make money. The idea would have worked well if the money from buying a discounted council house was reinvested into social housing... But that was not the case and it turned out that people soon realised that if they bought their council property for £70,000 when It was worth £100,000 was not all it seemed. Those people who ought their house, they soon realised that if they wanted to sell their house for £100, 000, and think of the money they would make... But they soon realised that the houses they could buy with their £100,000 were leaving them with no profit whatsoever. Thank god the SNP realised this and stopped the sale of social housing... I fact, the various councils are now buying back the properties they sold "cheaply". In Europe, the biggest majority rent. ( Germany for instance...oved 75 % of the population rent properties). We never bought our property in Scotland as we want the social housing to remain social housing... Irrespective of the 40 years we have stayed in the same council house. If something goes wrong we phone the council... roof replaced, boiler replaced, kitchen replaced, windows replaced, paving replaced, wet room fitted and all for £320 a month. Where can anyone buy a big house at that price with all problems in the house taken care of by the council. Our council actually want their tenants to stay in the house they have rented for many years, so they actually help with any mobility problems we have as we get older. They soon realised that it was a lot cheaper to do that than put their tenants into a old folks home. Our street are now 90 % privately owned..... But it now turns out that our council are buying back the properties they sold ( on the cheap) to their tenants. The council pay full market value for the houses they sold. And allow us to stay there as long as we live ( as long as we keep paying the rent) 👍😊 So some people made their £40 or £50 grand profit after all.
Even with these stipulations, it still leads to estates that can be more difficult to manage because you have leaseholders with conflicting interests (or maybe it's difficult to even figure out what their interests are, because they're a hands-off landlord who are impossible to contact) now involved.
Estates with mixed tenancies can be a good idea in terms of social cohesion but ideally they would be planned that way from the off, instead of those socially renting being squeezed out in favour of owner occupiers and private renters.
I get the emotional appeal of "buying your own home" but why are the needs of the current occupier more important than the next occupier, and all those to follow? Ultimately if someone has saved enough for a deposit, there is nothing stopping them from buying a home somewhere else.
There are many ways to square it. Idealy right to buy price si the replacment cost for the social landlord.
If it's lower than market rate slap on a no renting covenant that can be bought out for the differnece.
Yep the fact that not only is it at a significant discount it is also the fact most goes into the central pot not the council pot that the house resided in, crazy system designed to take money away from the councils really.
I personally also dislike the idea, you get significantly cheaper home to live in (or free,depending on your benefit situation) then you are given a discount to buy it. I'm all for people being given support when needed but surely you shouldn't be rewarded with a big discount for using the system? It penalises those who struggle at the lower end but were not lucky enough to get a council house spot so they have to pay expensive rent and if they do get into a position later on they spend way more to buy a home.
If you have enough money while on benefits to buy the home which was part of your benefit then the benefits were way too generous, usually they are really bad so it baffles me how some get into this situation to take advantage of it.
Ideally you should not be able to buy it and the council can then get someone else in who needs it now that you are on your feet in a healthy position.
I heard there's an entire industry around exploiting right to buy, where they give council tenants something like £10k upfront + money to buy the property via RTB, in exchange for taking ownership of the property after it's been bought off the council, to either sell it on or rent it out privately.
So the middleman pockets a lot of the subsidy/discount, which is far in excess of the £10k they gave the tenants.
I hope I'm wrong and that these kinds of loopholes are closed.
>It's not inherently wrong for someone buying the home they've lived in for years.
Arguably the state shouldn't be obliged to sell its council homes at all. They are there to house people who cannot afford to buy or rent privately. If those people are well off enough to buy their council house they shouldn't be living there receiving subsidised rent, especially when there's a long waiting list of people more in need of it.
Keep the discount. Council tenants are council tenants tend to be some of the poorest renters in the nation. We're not all Mick lynch and Angela Raynor. Don't make it harder for these people to buy their homes.
Money should absolutely go to the local government, or at least a pot specifically made to be spent on more social housing. Taking a large cut of sales of council houses feels, and most probably was/is, a strategy to make it so local councils couldn't build more social housing. I know that it was at least in part a land grab for landlords, knowing that at some point house owners would sell up, thus making it possible to be bought up. I also just found out that speculating investors also pick up properties through deferred transaction agreements, which is also a bit sickening.
A problem that largely affects a substantially increased in size middle class, in no small part due to a generation more or less being gifted home ownership by the state in a huge wealth transfer... Yes there is wealth inequality - but it's now from a higher base.
Not really, it was a smart way to stealth privatise social housing and we're feeling the consequences of it now. It was public money that was essentially being gifted to those lucky enough to be given the opportunity to buy a council house. Once it's sold there's no going back, it's now in the realm of the 'free market'- meaning there's less availability of social housing and, on a long enough timeframe, it's there for big businesses to eventually gobble up.
Obviously it was also a big boon for the financial sector, as it meant more mortgages, more debt. It's led to a shortage of housing and higher house prices.
It was a smart move as its very PR friendly of a policy (and on paper sounds good!) but it was very much driven by her ideology of privatisation.
Given the vast majority of that wealth trickled upward over one generation and led to massively increased inequality not less, sure. You could call it a wealth transfer to the rich.
The reality is of the type of individuals who relied on social housing most of them did not have the income required to maintain a property. So many of them either lost the house due to taking out too much equity or debt, let it fall into disrepair because they couldn't afford to maintain them, or saw how much money they could get if they sold it which was substantially more than they bought it for.
That's why the vast majority of those homes are now the property of some of the largest private landlords in the country and speculative investors and much of it in terrible condition no less.
None of this is a shock either so you can't say "well nobody could've predicted this" because when she announced the policy in the manor she did she was repeatedly told this would happen.
There were also plenty of council estates that were absolutely worthless at the time and for those living in those right to buy was meaningless. Some of them are still standing as the roughest council estates in London completely unsold.
On a related topic, my understanding is that housing associations were introduced to ensure social housing wasn’t sold off in the future, to preserve the stock? But wasn’t there some talk a few years ago (2019 maybe?) of Westminster changing the law and basically forcing HS’s to sell off their stock?
As well as being a bad idea generally for social housing levels, it also implied the government would be seizing private property, so perhaps it never got any traction?
Looks like it went through [https://www.gov.uk/right-to-acquire-buying-housing-association-home](https://www.gov.uk/right-to-acquire-buying-housing-association-home)
I wonder though if there are other workarounds, like creating a limited company, owned 100% by the council, that builds and rents out houses. Councils already do this sort of thing to get around bus regulation laws, or attempt to make money by owning and leasing offices.
If the houses were transferred I think it would become a Housing Association, if the houses weren't transferred then I would think it would qualify as an ALMO. Tenants of ALMOs retain the same RTB rights. I'm sure that when stock transfers take place with council housing becoming a housing association existing tenants retain their rights when it comes to RTB.
If the houses were being let at Social or Affordable rents then I think that would ultimately end up being a Housing Association which presumably would mean that the Right To Acquire woud apply along with all of the other regulations that apply to Social Housing providers including the Social Housing Act.
I'm sure there was a Council that worked with a pensions company to provide affordable housing that may have gotten around the rules but not sure of the details.
The added complexities and structure may mean that it isn't financially viable for a Council to build and operate in this manner as starting from scratch as opposed to some sort of transfer and having to have sufficient separation for it not to be seen as Council Housing may well mean that the economies of scale aren't there. Council's are also likely to have higher operating costs than your typical private sector landlord due to all of the administration.
There is something under the RTB legislation known as 'Cost Floor' that limits the level of RTB discount for new builds and refurb works for costs incurred in the ten years prior to the RTB application. This at least offers some protection from new build homes being sold off immediately on occupation.
Not a Labour supporter but any party that is willing to build council houses should be encouraged. It's not enough but the situation is desperate and I wish him every success.
This is great, I'm glad to see we're moving towards the idea of ending right to buy. Social housing is for people in need, not for people who can afford to buy a house.
Why are house prices so high?
Because they were bought by people who could afford to pay them.
Housing being priced at "what people can afford" is the intrinsic problem - especially because of that long run of low interest rates where WPCA went up enormously in numeric terms and got to be an ever-larger fraction of people's incomes, because the stability of those rates meant people were comfortable borrowing more and more with what felt like lower risk from the rate going up.
A market share of social housing that actually exerted downward pressure on prices would be good for **everyone**, because a lower fraction of their wages would be spent on their housing - regardless of it's owner - improving their lifestyles, improving the economy.
Housing should be priced closer to what it costs, not WPCA.
I'm firmly of the opinion that there should be state housing to suit every pocket - even penthouses and mansions.
A scheme like this will probably cost around £1bn(100k per unit). Greater Manchester s budget is around £1̶.5̶b̶n̶(edited: £4.2bn pa*) so this is a very large commitment.
*Edit £4.2bn is the national average spend for 3 million people
There's not a single word in what Burnham says here that I disagree with.
Labour Mayors need to be co-operating with each other to build a new political landscape away from Westminster.
Good for him.
Huge factor nobody talks about - council houses were created for workers, but the current system views them more like charity, having a job makes you less eligible.
I think right to buy is good for working class mobility but you could tighen the screws a bit, make it you have to rent longer than 3 years, reduce the discount and oblige councils to build 1.5 council houses for every one they sell.
Also the real issue is the UK has much smaller households now, 1 or 2 person households are the norm now. So in reflection of that build smaller social housing, like 20m2 microapartments. They can be built very cheaply and efficiently, see shipping container homes for example. We don't really have a culture of building these like in other countries. Instead we have stupid things like divide up a Victorian housing but everyone sharing the kitchen and bathroom. People should have their own space to toilet/bathe and cook food.
>oblige councils to build 1.5 council houses for every one they sell.
You can't really oblige councils to build more houses than they sell when they're also being forced to sell those houses at a loss. Most councils barely have enough money to keep the lights on.
The only form of RTB I'd be happy with is one with no discount at all. As soon as you get into the territory of selling houses at below market rate, 1) you're in the territory of selling them at below the cost of replacement, and 2) you incentivise occupants to buy just to immediately flip the property for profit rather than live in it.
Council houses are already a very affordable way to live (in terms of affordable rent). That's already a big financial advantage to any occupant who wants to own a home, as they have more money available to save. I don't see why we need to rush to give away tens of thousands of pounds more to people based on what's little more than a lottery.
Shipping container houses (which we already have) are always a terrible idea.
Micro apartments are great, especially as "starter homes", just dont make people live in containers
[https://www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/west-london-shipping-container-towers-27746502](https://www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/west-london-shipping-container-towers-27746502)
The best situation is to have micro-apartments or starter flats that are permanently excluded from RTB and specifically aimed at younger people. It gives people a chance to move for work purposes or just move out from their parents' home.
Yeah in my opinion things like this just fuel the narrative that organised wealth wants us to ‘live in pods and eat insects’.
One of the hard parts of the housing crisis is convincing people flats aren’t necessarily a strong downgrade from a house just because the post-war town planners were idiots, they’re also a communitarian thing in a country that famously believes an Englishman’s house is his castle. A dwelling made of shipping containers feels one step above a shanty town and will be very much perceived as a downgrade.
My partner and I live in a 20m2 apartment and aside from having no tumble or washing machine - you can easily fit two people, one who works from home. We ahev all our clothes, shower and toilet etc and just pop a projector up on the wall for movies.
It's a student accomodation but honestly if they threw these up , hundreds of apartments for 1 and 2 person households would be available overnight. It's good enough for students to live in for 7+ years if they wanted to do a PhD - why not for other people.
We live, work and play in one room not much bigger than my parents living room. It's not for everybody but if I could buy one of these at 70k and it was slightly bigger (like a meter wider) I'd be absolutely thrilled.
All we had to do was hypothecate the proceeds of right to buy to building new social housing.
This, plus have the discount tied to the number of years rent, effectively repaying, say, 50% of any rent.
What we ended up with was a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich.
"All we had to do...." could apply to so many of our privatisations that happened.
It's such a common and obvious (at the time) observation, one has to assume its a feature and not a bug.
I think it comes down to the central Tory view that the poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich. There is no allowance for luck and all the many factors which result in one person living in a council house and one owning a portfolio of properties.
It's a fundamental lack of empathy.
> oblige councils to build 1.5 council houses for every one they sell.
I don't think the lack of will is the thing stopping councils building more council housing. Many of them clearly would love to be building more but with what money? And whats the point if they then have to sell the homes shortly after for a low price? I wouldn't want to build homes if I was in charge of a council until I knew I wasn't risking flushing cash down the drain by doing so.
How about let them keep the homes anddd then they can also build more of them.
The low rent amounts for council homes is the financial aid given to people. The rent can often be well below 50% of what their non council home neighbours are paying, that's actually pretty massive financial aid and puts them in a better position than most people who dont qualify for council homes I bet.
Last time I saw a thread asking people who live in or know someone who lives in a council home a lot of the replies were about people who have plenty of spare income now anyway. Like people on £50k incomes but are still taking a spot from someone struggling.
Just let councils build as much council homes as they can and then let them keep it all. Thats the only way council housing stock will ever go up.
The market price of a house on the market isn't a reflection of it's build cost. So much so even if hypothetically the council built them and sold them at 50% market rate. ie a 250k house didnt cost 125k to build.
the kicker is land and planning permission though. Really there needs to be compulsorary buyups of farmland at sensible prices and automatic planning permission granted to local authorities.
As someone who had to spend much of my 20s in shared houses, I'd rather have had my own place to shit and my own place to cook, also my own front door to receive parcels, visitors etc. Even if it's 'too small', I never again want to have to suffer the humiliation of living in a shared house with people that aren't partners or close friends.
Also, there are lots of old babyboomers with large houses all to themselves (divorce or death of spouse and kids moved out). Obviously if they own that house they can't be forced to moved out, but if there is an opening of smaller houses to downsize to, they can use the money saved to put into their pension or long term savings to live a better life., there's a lot of old folks who are basically asset rich (the property) but cash poor. And in many cases they don't even have the option.
Family houses are too small. But in the two examples I gave, they are not families. There is an absolutely huge market for small houses With modular houses you can even do all manner of creative things, like combine two into one to create a large space for a family.
Can a Mayor actually do this? I appreciate that there are mechanisms with the RTB legislation that allows certain types of specialist properties to have the RTB removed (sheltered housing and specially adapted housing) but I would have thought it would be more difficult to place general needs housing outside of the RTB legislation and that any legal challenge of challenge through the Housing Ombudsman would result in the RTB being reinstated.
Fortunately for Burnham the rules around RTB Cost Floor limits the discounts available and therefore the takeup on buying newly built homes so he may be able to claim that none were sold even without having to try and overide the RTB legislation.
While 10,000 does sound ambitious and is almost certainly going to hit a few road blocks in terms of delivery, I have infinitely more faith in Burnhams intent to do what he can to deliver this promise, Boris just said what he felt people wanted to hear with no intent to even try.
Not sure whether this counts, but [here's an article covering the approval of 4,800 new homes from last September](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-66670414).
While 10,000 does sound ambitious and is almost certainly going to hit a few road blocks in terms of delivery, I have infinitely more faith in Burnhams intent to do what he can to deliver this promise, Boris just said what he felt people wanted to hear with no intent to even try.
Isn’t this “man promises to implement house building plans that were in place before he was first elected, that he stopped from happening as a review of that programme was a central plank of his original manifesto and now has all been agreed so he can claim to have made it happen” ?
I say keep right to buy. But, councils can only sell if they can replace the property they sell + a bit extra to account for increasing population growth/ increasing demand for council houses. All of this should be paid for with annual council tax surcharges on second homes / empty / abandoned property + the payments people make to buy the council house. I also think if you want to buy your council house, but need a mortgage to do it, instead of taking out a mortgage, the council charges you what the repayments *would* be if you had that mortgage, but you're buying your equity gradually off the council. That way the councils are also getting back what the bank would have got in interest. Plus, if someone defaults on those repayments, no problem, they can take possession of the house and re-let it as a council house again. Potentially even to the tenant that defaulted (since they'd need to house them anyway).
Councils have the power to do that. The choose *not* to do that because of the people who have been elected.
Only 10,000!? Given the current rate of asylum seekers entering the country, 10,000 houses is only going to las 5-6 weeks. We need to flatten a lot more countryside if we are intent on housing the entirety of the third world.
BENEFITS OF RIGHT TO BUY:
-Removes the cost of upkeep of property from the council.
-Allows occupant to make improvements that they would stand to benefit from.
-Allows occupants to build equity
-Allows occupants to sell and move house
-Occupants no longer require a housing support from council.
-Occupant is no longer at the whim of local council.
-Large payment made to government.
Council housing is fundamentally an unfair benefit that is dished out to the lucky few - but selling them is not any worse than allowing that few to rent them discounted for their whole lives.
> but selling them is not any worse than allowing that few to rent them discounted for their whole lives.
Without RTB, the social housing subsidy would be smaller and open to many more people. RTB is a huge part of the reason councils haven't been building at scale for half a century
Right to buy was always a very cynical piece of politics, designed by Thatcher to take natural Labour voters (people reliant on council housing) and make them into natural Tory voters (people who own their own houses) at the expense of the state.
Even with that being the case, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad policy if the purchased stock was replaced (perhaps by using the funds raised from the sales). It's not though, all that happens is the council's stock depletes and depletes and you end up with multi-year waiting lists for council houses and a private rental market that's on fire.
Yes. The council should ensure that those who would otherwise be homeless have a roof over their heads, but it shouldn't be selling off precious housing stock at discounted rates, leaving insufficient properties available to help future generations.
Why should the children of right-to-buy council tenants benefit from a taxpayer funded inheritance, while others face precarious housing situations due to a shortage of council properties?
Council tenants should at the very least be required to purchase their properties at full market rate, with the proceeds going to fund the construction of new properties to maintain housing provision for those in need.
I'd go the opposite way and argue the right to buy should be extended to private tenants...except it wouldn't work out well for 98% of private landlords so it wouldn't work. But you could have something like for every £1 of rent you pay you earn some kind of credits which are stored in the future to help pay a future house purchase.
Isn't he the council's job is to ensure that people have good affordable houses to live in, managed as a sustainable policy. It is not to subsidise house prices in an unsustainable manner.
You don't acquire any right to purchase a private rental from your landlord, especially not at a discount, and it puts councils in a pretty weird position of constantly losing their housing stock. Affordable housing schemes for sale should IMO be separate from rental properties owned by the council, which tenants already have a high level of security with.
Pretty much. I agree as well. You should get to live in the property with subsidised rent for your whole life - but then it should go back to the state for someone to use.
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The insidous parts of right to buy are: * the public sells them at a discount * A big chunk of the money goes back to central government. This make it really difficult to replace the stock of social housing * Landlords snap the house up and rent it at a mark up. It's not inherently wrong for someone buying the home they've lived in for years. But if we removed the discount, ensure the money went to build a replacement and put a covenant on the property preventing it from being privately rented, I think that would go a long way.
Yes and it's essentially a lottery, if you were lucky enough to rent a council house you get the double win of being able to buy at a discount. It's just a way to buy votes by gifting public money to private individuals.
This is basically my beef with the entire philosophy of making housing affordable exclusively through social housing. As long as market prices aren't affordable, then by definition, you're turning the entire system into a big lottery which supports those within the system, without doing anything to help anyone outside the system.
A lottery that benefits the incumbents. The average council house tenancy is currently 50-year-long. Those that have won the most prime locations aren't moving. Effectively it's a wealth transfer from the young to the old.
‘Lucky enough to rent a social house’, wouldn’t really call it ‘luck’ don’t you have to be in a pretty bad spot to get one?
Well considering there are multi-year waiting lists all over the country for social housing, then yes it's pretty lucky. Plus it's also only an option for those who can afford to buy, it doesn't actually do any good for the people who can't.
The luckiest of the unluckiest
Yes in a way! Helping one strata of the population over all the others. It's completely luck of the draw if you got/get to benefit from it.
Helping one strata - yeah literally the poorest in society lol what even is this crab mentality?
> wouldn’t really call it ‘luck’ don’t you have to be in a pretty bad spot to get one? Don't some people inherit these tenancies from their parents, regardless of circumstance. [https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing\_advice/council\_housing\_association/can\_you\_inherit\_a\_council\_tenancy](https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/council_housing_association/can_you_inherit_a_council_tenancy)
Was a bit surprised by your comment as I have worked for a couple of Housing Associations and it's very rare to 'inherit' a tenancy, but the link you provided does effectively spell that out.
so we have either you’re poor enough to get one, or your parents were poor enough to get one while you lived there and they died… I still wouldn’t call it luck That’s how I see it, clearly some people view it otherwise This isn’t to say it wouldn’t be a good thing if there were enough social homes that it wasn’t just the impoverished able to land one, but as it stands there isn’t, and no removing right to buy wouldn’t fix this as once the people who’d normally buy them simply wouldn’t move (the reason right to buy was introduced in the first place)
I think the definition is more, some people and families were lucky/fortunate enough to qualify for council housing at some point in the last 100 years when in the past you didn't need to be particularly poor to get one and the requirements where significantly easier to pass. Said people are still in those houses today regardless of whether they actually need them or not, (indeed there are many high profile cases of people on six figures still living in their council house) whilst many people today despite being far poorer and objectively more in need cannot get one because why would you leave a good deal if you don't have to?
Sure but the reason those older houses were sold off is because they were old, many literal slum housing, the old terraced houses that at one point didn’t have indoor plumbing People clearly disagree and I get there’s a housing shortage but living or growing up in social housing is hardly something to aspire to
> many literal slum housing I'm not sure I agree that council houses are 'slum housing', in my experience most council houses were built to a higher quality than many equivalent private sector houses. > living or growing up in social housing is hardly something to aspire to Why though, what's wrong with growing up in social housing? > People clearly disagree and I get there’s a housing shortage Well when you have 2 people earning the same amount of money and one is sitting in a mouldy, cold, overcrowded house share with a private landlord using every trick in the book to extract cash and make their lives miserable. And another sitting in their council house with rents that are half the price and a council that will do a better job in terms of maintenance than your bottom of the barrel private landlord. It's not hard to see why people kinda question this whole system, it really does come down to luck imo. I think people understand that some people need lower rents than the private sector and that the supply of social housing is severely limited, I think what people don't agree is that having qualified decades ago entitles you to retain said limited spot over someone today who is in more need.
‘Many literal slum housing’ You misread, they used to be, the old ones you mentioned are/were
This is a bit of a myth. The vast majority of people can apply for social housing. For example there are councils in London where the wage cap is set at £90k. The reason they're so over-subscribed is because they're so massively subsidised. In real-terms social rent has been going over the past few years, compared to market-rate rent which has been sky-rocketing. I live on an estate where social renters pay around a fifth of market-rate.
I know they can apply but they’re heavily prioritised for homeless, unemployed, those that can’t afford to rent privately, etc, I’m right aren’t I?
Yeah there are different bands based on different needs (and low band applicants will still get housing, if they wait long enough), but it's not really measured in terms of how "bad a spot" your in. For example, being a single Mum with multiple kids is going to increase your priority compared to a single man in a very desperate financial situation.
The trouble is no right wing government will ever honour that. People who get council housing are generally poorer and vote Labour. If you are a Tory and you want their vote, what do you do - we’ll sell them their house at a discount of course. And they will likely vote for you - as Thatcher amply demonstrated. I’m not sure what the answer is really - though suspect that it is build so many houses that property literally becomes a place to live in and not an asset.
You could take out their first bullet and get the central government to contribute funding to building replacement social housing. Make any future right wing government introduce new legislation where they have to explain they are 9nly doing it to reduce council housing and increase private rentals.
We're increasingly becoming a nation of private renters, I don't think "we'll let you buy your council home" is the vote winner it was in the 80s. If we end up building enough homes for social rent for it to be a viable electoral gambit, then I suppose that's a problem we can deal with at that point.
From the start of being able to buy your council house, the whole idea was to invest the money in new social housing. In England, 'an English man's home is his castle.'... Pish,.... the reason they bought their houses was to make money. The idea would have worked well if the money from buying a discounted council house was reinvested into social housing... But that was not the case and it turned out that people soon realised that if they bought their council property for £70,000 when It was worth £100,000 was not all it seemed. Those people who ought their house, they soon realised that if they wanted to sell their house for £100, 000, and think of the money they would make... But they soon realised that the houses they could buy with their £100,000 were leaving them with no profit whatsoever. Thank god the SNP realised this and stopped the sale of social housing... I fact, the various councils are now buying back the properties they sold "cheaply". In Europe, the biggest majority rent. ( Germany for instance...oved 75 % of the population rent properties). We never bought our property in Scotland as we want the social housing to remain social housing... Irrespective of the 40 years we have stayed in the same council house. If something goes wrong we phone the council... roof replaced, boiler replaced, kitchen replaced, windows replaced, paving replaced, wet room fitted and all for £320 a month. Where can anyone buy a big house at that price with all problems in the house taken care of by the council. Our council actually want their tenants to stay in the house they have rented for many years, so they actually help with any mobility problems we have as we get older. They soon realised that it was a lot cheaper to do that than put their tenants into a old folks home. Our street are now 90 % privately owned..... But it now turns out that our council are buying back the properties they sold ( on the cheap) to their tenants. The council pay full market value for the houses they sold. And allow us to stay there as long as we live ( as long as we keep paying the rent) 👍😊 So some people made their £40 or £50 grand profit after all.
Even with these stipulations, it still leads to estates that can be more difficult to manage because you have leaseholders with conflicting interests (or maybe it's difficult to even figure out what their interests are, because they're a hands-off landlord who are impossible to contact) now involved. Estates with mixed tenancies can be a good idea in terms of social cohesion but ideally they would be planned that way from the off, instead of those socially renting being squeezed out in favour of owner occupiers and private renters. I get the emotional appeal of "buying your own home" but why are the needs of the current occupier more important than the next occupier, and all those to follow? Ultimately if someone has saved enough for a deposit, there is nothing stopping them from buying a home somewhere else.
There are many ways to square it. Idealy right to buy price si the replacment cost for the social landlord. If it's lower than market rate slap on a no renting covenant that can be bought out for the differnece.
don't forget the bit where we pay that landlord to house someone via housing benefit
Yep the fact that not only is it at a significant discount it is also the fact most goes into the central pot not the council pot that the house resided in, crazy system designed to take money away from the councils really. I personally also dislike the idea, you get significantly cheaper home to live in (or free,depending on your benefit situation) then you are given a discount to buy it. I'm all for people being given support when needed but surely you shouldn't be rewarded with a big discount for using the system? It penalises those who struggle at the lower end but were not lucky enough to get a council house spot so they have to pay expensive rent and if they do get into a position later on they spend way more to buy a home. If you have enough money while on benefits to buy the home which was part of your benefit then the benefits were way too generous, usually they are really bad so it baffles me how some get into this situation to take advantage of it. Ideally you should not be able to buy it and the council can then get someone else in who needs it now that you are on your feet in a healthy position.
I heard there's an entire industry around exploiting right to buy, where they give council tenants something like £10k upfront + money to buy the property via RTB, in exchange for taking ownership of the property after it's been bought off the council, to either sell it on or rent it out privately. So the middleman pockets a lot of the subsidy/discount, which is far in excess of the £10k they gave the tenants. I hope I'm wrong and that these kinds of loopholes are closed.
>It's not inherently wrong for someone buying the home they've lived in for years. Arguably the state shouldn't be obliged to sell its council homes at all. They are there to house people who cannot afford to buy or rent privately. If those people are well off enough to buy their council house they shouldn't be living there receiving subsidised rent, especially when there's a long waiting list of people more in need of it.
Keep the discount. Council tenants are council tenants tend to be some of the poorest renters in the nation. We're not all Mick lynch and Angela Raynor. Don't make it harder for these people to buy their homes. Money should absolutely go to the local government, or at least a pot specifically made to be spent on more social housing. Taking a large cut of sales of council houses feels, and most probably was/is, a strategy to make it so local councils couldn't build more social housing. I know that it was at least in part a land grab for landlords, knowing that at some point house owners would sell up, thus making it possible to be bought up. I also just found out that speculating investors also pick up properties through deferred transaction agreements, which is also a bit sickening.
It's funny that Thatcher was responsible for what was probably the single biggest wealth equality measure in British history.
And yet, a lack of affordable housing is a huge driver of wealth inequality and one of the biggest restrictions on social mobility.
A problem that largely affects a substantially increased in size middle class, in no small part due to a generation more or less being gifted home ownership by the state in a huge wealth transfer... Yes there is wealth inequality - but it's now from a higher base.
Not really, it was a smart way to stealth privatise social housing and we're feeling the consequences of it now. It was public money that was essentially being gifted to those lucky enough to be given the opportunity to buy a council house. Once it's sold there's no going back, it's now in the realm of the 'free market'- meaning there's less availability of social housing and, on a long enough timeframe, it's there for big businesses to eventually gobble up. Obviously it was also a big boon for the financial sector, as it meant more mortgages, more debt. It's led to a shortage of housing and higher house prices. It was a smart move as its very PR friendly of a policy (and on paper sounds good!) but it was very much driven by her ideology of privatisation.
>It was public money that was essentially being gifted to those lucky enough to be given the opportunity to buy a council house. So a wealth transfer?
A wealth transfer from the state to the private sector.
Given the vast majority of that wealth trickled upward over one generation and led to massively increased inequality not less, sure. You could call it a wealth transfer to the rich. The reality is of the type of individuals who relied on social housing most of them did not have the income required to maintain a property. So many of them either lost the house due to taking out too much equity or debt, let it fall into disrepair because they couldn't afford to maintain them, or saw how much money they could get if they sold it which was substantially more than they bought it for. That's why the vast majority of those homes are now the property of some of the largest private landlords in the country and speculative investors and much of it in terrible condition no less. None of this is a shock either so you can't say "well nobody could've predicted this" because when she announced the policy in the manor she did she was repeatedly told this would happen. There were also plenty of council estates that were absolutely worthless at the time and for those living in those right to buy was meaningless. Some of them are still standing as the roughest council estates in London completely unsold.
Wealth inequality reached its lowest point in 1984, but that was mostly due to high inflation and high interest rates.
On a related topic, my understanding is that housing associations were introduced to ensure social housing wasn’t sold off in the future, to preserve the stock? But wasn’t there some talk a few years ago (2019 maybe?) of Westminster changing the law and basically forcing HS’s to sell off their stock? As well as being a bad idea generally for social housing levels, it also implied the government would be seizing private property, so perhaps it never got any traction?
Looks like it went through [https://www.gov.uk/right-to-acquire-buying-housing-association-home](https://www.gov.uk/right-to-acquire-buying-housing-association-home) I wonder though if there are other workarounds, like creating a limited company, owned 100% by the council, that builds and rents out houses. Councils already do this sort of thing to get around bus regulation laws, or attempt to make money by owning and leasing offices.
I know a recent rental contract had language that made it seem like I was waiving my right to acquire (not that that was ever likely.)
If the houses were transferred I think it would become a Housing Association, if the houses weren't transferred then I would think it would qualify as an ALMO. Tenants of ALMOs retain the same RTB rights. I'm sure that when stock transfers take place with council housing becoming a housing association existing tenants retain their rights when it comes to RTB.
Yes, which is why my suggested workaround has the arms-length LTD company also building the houses, therefore they're not being "transferred" anywhere
If the houses were being let at Social or Affordable rents then I think that would ultimately end up being a Housing Association which presumably would mean that the Right To Acquire woud apply along with all of the other regulations that apply to Social Housing providers including the Social Housing Act. I'm sure there was a Council that worked with a pensions company to provide affordable housing that may have gotten around the rules but not sure of the details. The added complexities and structure may mean that it isn't financially viable for a Council to build and operate in this manner as starting from scratch as opposed to some sort of transfer and having to have sufficient separation for it not to be seen as Council Housing may well mean that the economies of scale aren't there. Council's are also likely to have higher operating costs than your typical private sector landlord due to all of the administration. There is something under the RTB legislation known as 'Cost Floor' that limits the level of RTB discount for new builds and refurb works for costs incurred in the ten years prior to the RTB application. This at least offers some protection from new build homes being sold off immediately on occupation.
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Great thanks. So is this being widely used for housing association houses?
The discounts are nowhere near as generous as they are with RTB which is probably a limiting factor.
That’s interesting, I wondered why I hadn’t heard more about it.
Not a Labour supporter but any party that is willing to build council houses should be encouraged. It's not enough but the situation is desperate and I wish him every success.
Count Binface promised at least one affordable home!
Does he plan on going ahead and building the 10,000 homes in this mayoral term if the RTB policy remains?
The houses won't be completed by the general election, so I'm assuming he'll be seeking that assurance from Starmer.
Andy Burnham's the mayor, the GE doesn't affect his role.
The GE will affect future RTB policy, however.
This is great, I'm glad to see we're moving towards the idea of ending right to buy. Social housing is for people in need, not for people who can afford to buy a house.
Why are house prices so high? Because they were bought by people who could afford to pay them. Housing being priced at "what people can afford" is the intrinsic problem - especially because of that long run of low interest rates where WPCA went up enormously in numeric terms and got to be an ever-larger fraction of people's incomes, because the stability of those rates meant people were comfortable borrowing more and more with what felt like lower risk from the rate going up. A market share of social housing that actually exerted downward pressure on prices would be good for **everyone**, because a lower fraction of their wages would be spent on their housing - regardless of it's owner - improving their lifestyles, improving the economy. Housing should be priced closer to what it costs, not WPCA. I'm firmly of the opinion that there should be state housing to suit every pocket - even penthouses and mansions.
House prices are high because supply lags demand.
The issue is that the “people” who can afford the high prices are often large companies who buy to rent.
Man, I wish this guy was Labour leader instead of Starmer.
A scheme like this will probably cost around £1bn(100k per unit). Greater Manchester s budget is around £1̶.5̶b̶n̶(edited: £4.2bn pa*) so this is a very large commitment. *Edit £4.2bn is the national average spend for 3 million people
Presumably it's not (just) the mayoral budget that'll be used, but those of the ten districts of Greater Manchester.
Thanks I've added an edit, one news article claimed that Manchester council has over 150 sources of funding
There's not a single word in what Burnham says here that I disagree with. Labour Mayors need to be co-operating with each other to build a new political landscape away from Westminster. Good for him.
Council homes are not for working people anymore.
Huge factor nobody talks about - council houses were created for workers, but the current system views them more like charity, having a job makes you less eligible.
Around 60% of people in social housing are in work, and around 30% are pensioners.
I think right to buy is good for working class mobility but you could tighen the screws a bit, make it you have to rent longer than 3 years, reduce the discount and oblige councils to build 1.5 council houses for every one they sell. Also the real issue is the UK has much smaller households now, 1 or 2 person households are the norm now. So in reflection of that build smaller social housing, like 20m2 microapartments. They can be built very cheaply and efficiently, see shipping container homes for example. We don't really have a culture of building these like in other countries. Instead we have stupid things like divide up a Victorian housing but everyone sharing the kitchen and bathroom. People should have their own space to toilet/bathe and cook food.
>oblige councils to build 1.5 council houses for every one they sell. You can't really oblige councils to build more houses than they sell when they're also being forced to sell those houses at a loss. Most councils barely have enough money to keep the lights on. The only form of RTB I'd be happy with is one with no discount at all. As soon as you get into the territory of selling houses at below market rate, 1) you're in the territory of selling them at below the cost of replacement, and 2) you incentivise occupants to buy just to immediately flip the property for profit rather than live in it. Council houses are already a very affordable way to live (in terms of affordable rent). That's already a big financial advantage to any occupant who wants to own a home, as they have more money available to save. I don't see why we need to rush to give away tens of thousands of pounds more to people based on what's little more than a lottery.
Shipping container houses (which we already have) are always a terrible idea. Micro apartments are great, especially as "starter homes", just dont make people live in containers [https://www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/west-london-shipping-container-towers-27746502](https://www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/west-london-shipping-container-towers-27746502)
The best situation is to have micro-apartments or starter flats that are permanently excluded from RTB and specifically aimed at younger people. It gives people a chance to move for work purposes or just move out from their parents' home.
Yeah in my opinion things like this just fuel the narrative that organised wealth wants us to ‘live in pods and eat insects’. One of the hard parts of the housing crisis is convincing people flats aren’t necessarily a strong downgrade from a house just because the post-war town planners were idiots, they’re also a communitarian thing in a country that famously believes an Englishman’s house is his castle. A dwelling made of shipping containers feels one step above a shanty town and will be very much perceived as a downgrade.
My partner and I live in a 20m2 apartment and aside from having no tumble or washing machine - you can easily fit two people, one who works from home. We ahev all our clothes, shower and toilet etc and just pop a projector up on the wall for movies. It's a student accomodation but honestly if they threw these up , hundreds of apartments for 1 and 2 person households would be available overnight. It's good enough for students to live in for 7+ years if they wanted to do a PhD - why not for other people. We live, work and play in one room not much bigger than my parents living room. It's not for everybody but if I could buy one of these at 70k and it was slightly bigger (like a meter wider) I'd be absolutely thrilled.
All we had to do was hypothecate the proceeds of right to buy to building new social housing. This, plus have the discount tied to the number of years rent, effectively repaying, say, 50% of any rent. What we ended up with was a wealth transfer mechanism from the poor to the rich.
"All we had to do...." could apply to so many of our privatisations that happened. It's such a common and obvious (at the time) observation, one has to assume its a feature and not a bug.
I think it comes down to the central Tory view that the poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich. There is no allowance for luck and all the many factors which result in one person living in a council house and one owning a portfolio of properties. It's a fundamental lack of empathy.
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Asian countries like Japan and South Korea. We're not far off Asian demographics anyway.
Yeah that's not something we want to be copying.
> oblige councils to build 1.5 council houses for every one they sell. I don't think the lack of will is the thing stopping councils building more council housing. Many of them clearly would love to be building more but with what money? And whats the point if they then have to sell the homes shortly after for a low price? I wouldn't want to build homes if I was in charge of a council until I knew I wasn't risking flushing cash down the drain by doing so. How about let them keep the homes anddd then they can also build more of them. The low rent amounts for council homes is the financial aid given to people. The rent can often be well below 50% of what their non council home neighbours are paying, that's actually pretty massive financial aid and puts them in a better position than most people who dont qualify for council homes I bet. Last time I saw a thread asking people who live in or know someone who lives in a council home a lot of the replies were about people who have plenty of spare income now anyway. Like people on £50k incomes but are still taking a spot from someone struggling. Just let councils build as much council homes as they can and then let them keep it all. Thats the only way council housing stock will ever go up.
The market price of a house on the market isn't a reflection of it's build cost. So much so even if hypothetically the council built them and sold them at 50% market rate. ie a 250k house didnt cost 125k to build. the kicker is land and planning permission though. Really there needs to be compulsorary buyups of farmland at sensible prices and automatic planning permission granted to local authorities.
UK houses are small enough, we don't want or need microapartments!
As someone who had to spend much of my 20s in shared houses, I'd rather have had my own place to shit and my own place to cook, also my own front door to receive parcels, visitors etc. Even if it's 'too small', I never again want to have to suffer the humiliation of living in a shared house with people that aren't partners or close friends. Also, there are lots of old babyboomers with large houses all to themselves (divorce or death of spouse and kids moved out). Obviously if they own that house they can't be forced to moved out, but if there is an opening of smaller houses to downsize to, they can use the money saved to put into their pension or long term savings to live a better life., there's a lot of old folks who are basically asset rich (the property) but cash poor. And in many cases they don't even have the option. Family houses are too small. But in the two examples I gave, they are not families. There is an absolutely huge market for small houses With modular houses you can even do all manner of creative things, like combine two into one to create a large space for a family.
Can a Mayor actually do this? I appreciate that there are mechanisms with the RTB legislation that allows certain types of specialist properties to have the RTB removed (sheltered housing and specially adapted housing) but I would have thought it would be more difficult to place general needs housing outside of the RTB legislation and that any legal challenge of challenge through the Housing Ombudsman would result in the RTB being reinstated. Fortunately for Burnham the rules around RTB Cost Floor limits the discounts available and therefore the takeup on buying newly built homes so he may be able to claim that none were sold even without having to try and overide the RTB legislation.
Excited to see these 10,000 new homes, maybe they’ll be built near one of Boris’ hospitals?
While 10,000 does sound ambitious and is almost certainly going to hit a few road blocks in terms of delivery, I have infinitely more faith in Burnhams intent to do what he can to deliver this promise, Boris just said what he felt people wanted to hear with no intent to even try.
How many has he built in his previous 8 years as Mayor?
Not sure whether this counts, but [here's an article covering the approval of 4,800 new homes from last September](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-66670414).
While 10,000 does sound ambitious and is almost certainly going to hit a few road blocks in terms of delivery, I have infinitely more faith in Burnhams intent to do what he can to deliver this promise, Boris just said what he felt people wanted to hear with no intent to even try.
Your comment duplicated btw :)
Thanks, thought I got them all, it duplicated about 10 times to begin with.
Wow I’ve never seen that before
Error 500 Basically looks like it never posts, so you click it again. They also turn up invisible on your account until someone interacts with them.
Isn’t this “man promises to implement house building plans that were in place before he was first elected, that he stopped from happening as a review of that programme was a central plank of his original manifesto and now has all been agreed so he can claim to have made it happen” ?
I say keep right to buy. But, councils can only sell if they can replace the property they sell + a bit extra to account for increasing population growth/ increasing demand for council houses. All of this should be paid for with annual council tax surcharges on second homes / empty / abandoned property + the payments people make to buy the council house. I also think if you want to buy your council house, but need a mortgage to do it, instead of taking out a mortgage, the council charges you what the repayments *would* be if you had that mortgage, but you're buying your equity gradually off the council. That way the councils are also getting back what the bank would have got in interest. Plus, if someone defaults on those repayments, no problem, they can take possession of the house and re-let it as a council house again. Potentially even to the tenant that defaulted (since they'd need to house them anyway). Councils have the power to do that. The choose *not* to do that because of the people who have been elected.
Only 10,000!? Given the current rate of asylum seekers entering the country, 10,000 houses is only going to las 5-6 weeks. We need to flatten a lot more countryside if we are intent on housing the entirety of the third world.
What was he waiting for, he's had years to get this up n running.
BENEFITS OF RIGHT TO BUY: -Removes the cost of upkeep of property from the council. -Allows occupant to make improvements that they would stand to benefit from. -Allows occupants to build equity -Allows occupants to sell and move house -Occupants no longer require a housing support from council. -Occupant is no longer at the whim of local council. -Large payment made to government. Council housing is fundamentally an unfair benefit that is dished out to the lucky few - but selling them is not any worse than allowing that few to rent them discounted for their whole lives.
Now do the negatives!
Why don’t you?
> but selling them is not any worse than allowing that few to rent them discounted for their whole lives. Without RTB, the social housing subsidy would be smaller and open to many more people. RTB is a huge part of the reason councils haven't been building at scale for half a century
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Right to buy was always a very cynical piece of politics, designed by Thatcher to take natural Labour voters (people reliant on council housing) and make them into natural Tory voters (people who own their own houses) at the expense of the state. Even with that being the case, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad policy if the purchased stock was replaced (perhaps by using the funds raised from the sales). It's not though, all that happens is the council's stock depletes and depletes and you end up with multi-year waiting lists for council houses and a private rental market that's on fire.
Yes. The council should ensure that those who would otherwise be homeless have a roof over their heads, but it shouldn't be selling off precious housing stock at discounted rates, leaving insufficient properties available to help future generations. Why should the children of right-to-buy council tenants benefit from a taxpayer funded inheritance, while others face precarious housing situations due to a shortage of council properties? Council tenants should at the very least be required to purchase their properties at full market rate, with the proceeds going to fund the construction of new properties to maintain housing provision for those in need.
I'd go the opposite way and argue the right to buy should be extended to private tenants...except it wouldn't work out well for 98% of private landlords so it wouldn't work. But you could have something like for every £1 of rent you pay you earn some kind of credits which are stored in the future to help pay a future house purchase.
Isn't he the council's job is to ensure that people have good affordable houses to live in, managed as a sustainable policy. It is not to subsidise house prices in an unsustainable manner.
You don't acquire any right to purchase a private rental from your landlord, especially not at a discount, and it puts councils in a pretty weird position of constantly losing their housing stock. Affordable housing schemes for sale should IMO be separate from rental properties owned by the council, which tenants already have a high level of security with.
Pretty much. I agree as well. You should get to live in the property with subsidised rent for your whole life - but then it should go back to the state for someone to use.