PM’s plan to build on right to buy legacy

BORIS Johnson is hoping to reintroduce a right to buy for 2.5million households in a major housing shake-up.

The plan is inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s defining right-to-buy policy for council tenants, introduced in 1980.

No 10 believes the new version – allowing tenants to get a discount of up to 70 per cent on the market price of their homes – will help scores of poorer households in former Red Wall seats.

The Prime Minister has told officials to draw up plans to help the 5million people living in accommodation rented from housing associations in England to own their properties.

Officials are pursuing a connecting idea of using the tens of billions of pounds paid by the Government in housing benefit to help recipients get mortgages.

A Government source told the Daily Telegraph: ‘The Prime Minister has got very excited about this. It could be hugely significant. In many ways it is a direct replica of the great Maggie idea of “buy your own council flat”. It is “buy your own housing association flat”.’

However, homelessness charity Shelter

‘Scheme will help Red Wall households’

dismissed the proposal as ‘harebrained’ and said ‘there could not be a worse time to sell off what remains of our last truly affordable social homes’.

And Labour’s housing spokesman Lisa Nandy tweeted: ‘This is desperate stuff from a tired government, repackaging a plan from 2015.

‘Millions of families in the private rented sector, with low savings and facing sky high-costs and rising bills, need far more ambitious plans to help them buy their own home.’

Should Mr Johnson’s plan come to fruition, it could increase levels of property ownership in England.

Owning a property is one of the surest indications of voting Conservative, historical electoral analysis shows.

The proposal first appeared in David Cameron’s 2015 Tory election manifesto – but the plan failed to materialise.

A pilot scheme began in the Midlands in 2018 and the 2019 Conservative General Election manifesto vowed to consider new pilots, but none emerged.