The Government’s proposed clampdown on the Right to Buy (RtB) scheme will see around 500,000 tenants become ineligible to buy their council home, a new report has found.
A consultation on the new RtB legislation closes today. It proposes tweaking the discount formula and requiring that tenants have lived in their homes for 10 rather than three years to qualify for the scheme.
Research by the Resolution Foundation found that these proposals would ‘significantly blunt’ the impact of the RtB scheme.
However, its report found that RtB purchases had already fallen to just 11,000 in 2022-23, and that 62% of England’s remaining social housing stock is owned by housing associations, and therefore not eligible for the original RtB scheme.
It said the proposal to exempt new-build homes from the RtB was ‘much more important’ to future proof the social housing stock.
But it warned that the Government faced a ‘huge’ task to replenish the affordable housing stock, which has fallen from a peak 5.5 million in the 1970s to 4.1 million, despite population growth.
The report says 400,000 new properties will be needed, at a cost of £50 billion, just to get back to 2010 levels of sub-market rent homes.
It means more than one in four of the Government’s 1.5 million new homes target would need to be built for sub-market rent.
Senior Resolution Foundation economist Cara Pacitti said: ‘New restrictions being proposed by the Government will effectively mark the end of Right to Buy.
‘But the job of replenishing Britain’s affordable housing stock has only just begun.’
