End of ‘right to buy’ in Scotland
BY TOM GORDON
ONE of the pillars of Thatcherism, the right of tenants to buy council houses, will finally end in Scotland from next week. The Right to Buy (RTB), which saw half-a-million Scots families purchase their council or housing association home at a discount, ends north of the Border a week today.
It was trumpeted as a vital step towards a “property-owning democracy”, a goal Margaret Thatcher identified in her first speech as Tory leader in 1975. Others saw a nakedly political attempt to undermine Labour’s working-class base and weaken municipal power.
It began in Scotland in 1980, with council tenants offered a 33 to 50 per cent discount, depending on how long they had lived in their home.
The scheme was extended to housing association tenants six years later. It proved so popular across supporters of all parties – Nicola Sturgeon’s parents were among those who took advantage – that Labour dropped its initial opposition after only a few years, preferring to tweak it when it returned to power under Tony Blair in 1997.
The policy changed the Scottish housing market almost beyond recognition. Around 35 per cent of homes were owner-occupied when it started, and after 20 years it was 63 per cent.
But in recent years, that has declined to 58 per cent as the private-rented sector has mushroomed – a symptom, say its critics, of RTB’s pernicious legacy. Devolution has had a critical impact. In England, the Tory Government continues to incentivise it with ever higher discounts. But in Scotland, the SNP and other parties have wound it down, heavily restricting it in 2010, then abolishing it in 2014 – a drawn-out process that concludes on July 31. The Welsh Government is also planning to abolish RTB.
According to the Scottish Federation Of Housing Associations, it has left multiple woes. From 1980 to 2015, around 495,000 homes were sold from Scotland’s social stock, but only 163,000 new ones built – a net loss of one-third of a million.
The result is a chronic housing shortage, 170,000 households on waiting lists, and more renting in the costlier private sector, pushing up the housing benefits bill.
Having stretched themselves to buy their home, many RTB owners have also been unable to pay for the upkeep, with mixed-tenure blocks and common areas falling into disrepair.
Jim Strang, chief executive of Parkhead Housing Association in Glasgow, saw RTB arrive in the city’s schemes and feared the worst from day one. The policy has been “an unmitigated disaster”, he says.
“People in those days ran up debts to put in new windows and central heating. You could tell who’d bought because of the new windows.
“Now the owner-occupiers have the rotten windows because the remaining social stock has been modernised, but the owners haven’t been able to afford it.”
Many people who bought flats also failed to realise they faced costly communal repairs, like installing new lifts, that their social tenants neighbours did not.
Strang says ending RTB is the right thing, but too little too late. “How many people are languishing on waiting lists? Hundreds of thousands. It could all have been prevented. As a social policy RTB was a disaster. I won’t lament its passing. But it won’t make an appreciable difference. The people who were going to exercise it have already done it. We’re still in the grip of a housing crisis. What would make a difference is massive investment in social housing. The Scottish Government have said they’re going to invest £3 billion. I would like to see the colour of their money.”
Neil Clapperton, chief executive of Grampian Housing Association, agrees. “Demand continues to far outweigh supply and waiting lists are in the thousands. Abolition is a case of closing the gate after the horse is bolted and doesn’t really deal with the legacy issues.” North Lanarkshire Labour councillor Harry McGuigan, housing spokesman for the council group Cosla, bought his home under RTB. “It looked as if it was helping people acquire the type of housing they wanted,” he says.
“But the money from sales wasn’t reinvested in newbuilds, and that’s led to a shortage of affordable housing.”
However, Scottish Tory housing spokesman Alex Johnstone says failure by successive Lab-Lib and SNP governments to build new social stock has led to “prejudice” against RTB, and its opponents have “misrepresented” it to deflect attention from their own mistakes.
“RTB was the biggest driver for social change in the last 50 years, both in Scotland and the rest of the UK,” he says. “It created some of the strongest communities we have in Scotland, and history will show it was a major positive. It had already withered on the vine in Scotland. Its abolition was just grandstanding by the last housing minister.”
Kevin Stewart, the new Housing Minister, says RTB’s demise will save 15,500 properties from sale. “With thousands of people on waiting lists, it was only right to scrap this scheme, as we could no longer afford to see the social sector lose out on badly needed homes. In the last Parliament we exceeded our target to deliver 30,000 affordable homes. In this Parliament we’re aiming for 50,000 homes.”