Hi ,
£194 billion of public wealth was given away for free by Right to Buy. This shocking new figure, from Common Wealth's analysis of the impact of Margaret Thatcher's most iconic policy, lays bare the scale of the disaster. But getting rid of nearly 2 million council homes hasn't just given us a housing crisis, it's changed the whole psyche of the UK for the worse.
Right to Buy was introduced in 1980. It wasn't the first time that council tenants could buy their homes; this has been possible since the 1930s and was becoming increasingly prevalent in the 1970s, but the 1980 Housing Act introduced two crucial changes: huge discounts of up to 70% of market value, and heavy restrictions on the how the money from sales could be used. Only half of the money from sales went to local government and using this money to build replacement homes was effectively banned. The intention and effect of this was to remove council housing and local government from the lives of most people.
By Common Wealth's calculations, the equity of the homes given away would today be worth £194bn. Of that value, very little made its way to the local authorities forced to sell their homes; around £51bn since 1980. The sold homes were never replaced. Even though subsequent governments did begin to soften some of the harshest restrictions on building, forcing councils to sell homes for far less than it costs to build them prevents meaningful replacement even before you consider the reason large areas of council homes could be built in cities by councils after 1945 was because of war damage and slum clearances. This has been hugely expensive for government, who now spend more on subsidising private landlords than they ever did building council homes.
But Right to Buy didn't just end destroy social housing, it also destroyed the ideas behind it: real, sustainable communities for all. In 1938, opening the Finsbury Health Centre, the architect Lubetkin proclaimed that “nothing is too good for ordinary people.” The homes, schools, hospitals, parks and more built after 1945 were designed by a state that believed the state was made up of the people living in it – and the public deserved to own something beautiful. By the time these were all sold off, the government believed the state was something for a small number of elites, to be kept away from the public. Even now, despite new restrictions from the current government on the discounts available, Right to Buy makes this kind of community building impossible, because why should councils try to build beautiful homes in humane estates if they're all going to be on Airbnb in 10 years?
And this is why the government’s push for house building is going to struggle. Private house builders have adapted to our planning system and build cheaply built, poorly regulated homes on relatively small parcels of land over and over again, in a patchwork of unplanned estates without basic amenities. Even in the 1930s, the last time private house building produced anything like the number of homes needed, the unplanned sprawling estates created in Metro-Land and other suburbs now experience higher levels of deprivation and lower social cohesion than inner cities or planned post-war council estates.
We need council housing and we need to resurrect the kind of belief in equality that made it possible in the first place. The good news is that other countries have figured this all out for us; all we need to do is copy them! Well designed publicly-owned, socially-rented homes are being built all over the world! Architects are desperate to begin projects that build beautiful new civic spaces and homes. Okay, maybe not the Trump ballroom plans. But the dream of nothing being too good for ordinary people is alive and well! |
