End of a dream as right-to-buy policy scrapped

THE dream of home ownership has been dashed for thousands of Scots as the SNP finally scrapped the ‘right to buy’ yesterday.

The death knell for one of Margaret Thatcher’s most popular policies after 34 years was sounded in a historic Holyrood vote.

More than 450,000 council tenants have been able to buy their own homes in Scotland thanks to the scheme, but more than 500,000 families now face missing out on their best opportunity to get a foot on the housing ladder.

Conservative housing spokesman Alex Johnstone made a last-ditch attempt to save rightto-buy but this was rejected by MSPs by 103 votes to 12.

The policy will officially be wiped from the statute books within two years of the Bill gaining Royal Ascent – reduced from the three-year timeframe originally proposed. The Scottish Government claims scrapping the policy could keep around 15,500 properties in the social-rented sector over a ten-year period.

But Mr Johnstone told MSPs the scheme had been the ‘greatest driver for social change in 50 years’, adding: ‘It has driven the aspiration for home ownership and it has been a positive in many areas.

‘I’m horrified the Scottish Government has decided this is a sensible course of action.

‘Not everyone can take the jump from renting straight into the private property market and right-to-buy allowed a bridge between that.

‘I think people in Scotland aspire to own their own homes but the Scottish Government has kicked the property ladder out from under them. Forcing people to rely on the state for housing is not a good thing – anyone can see that.

‘And this move will probably have a range of other negative consequences, creating a mad dash by tenants trying to buy their property before this policy is formally disposed of.’

Right-to-buy offered council tenants the chance to purchase

‘Forcing people to rely on the state’

their home from the local authority at a much lower price than market value, with discounts of up to 70 per cent.

But the scheme was controversial and divided opinion. For many it meant that they had security in their home and something to pass on to their children, but critics said it often made those lucky enough to be living in the right postcode hundreds of thousands of pounds richer overnight.

Yesterday, Scottish housing minister Margaret Burgess said ‘Ending right-to-buy will pre- serve valuable social housing, increase choice for tenants and those on waiting lists, and help ensure social housing’s role in mixed tenure communities that people want to live in.

‘In the face of all the evidence that right-to-buy has had its day and has no place in the Scotland we want to build, Mr Johnstone continues to call for this outdated and unpopular policy to continue.

‘This can only surely be because of his party’s historic attachment to right-to-buy. But surely even he must accept it flies in the face of what is best for landlords, tenants and communities.’

She told MSPs that more than 450,000 homes had been sold as a result of right-to-buy, blaming this as ‘a major cause of housing shortages in many areas’.

Labour’s Mary Fee backed scrapping the right-to-buy as soon as possible, saying the policy should be abolished within one year of the Bill gaining Royal Assent, instead of the two years proposed by the government: ‘Those that wish to exercise that right have had a decent amount of time in which to do so.’

DESPITE a vocal rearguard action by Conservative MSPs, the Scottish parliament yesterday voted to take away the right to buy from council house tenants.

The option of buying your own council house, which had stood for 35 years, was central to the long political success of Margaret Thatcher – at least in Basildon, and in vast swathes of England where the 1979 reform was exercised avidly.

Within a decade it created tens of thousands of new Tory voters down south – an aspirational, property-owning working class who would brook no threat to their mock-Georgian front doors from unreconstructed Labour.

In Scotland, the rush to buy your own home from the council was scarcely less enthusiastic. Almost half a million local authority homes have been bought by their tenants in the past three-and-a-half decades.

In 1981, i n the Glasgow Garscadden constituency held safely for Labour by Donald Dewar, 87.3 per cent of all homes were council houses. A decade later, the proportion had fallen to 59.1 per cent. And today, in what is now Glasgow North-West, it’s fewer than four homes in ten.

That’s still very high but well south of the positively Eastern European order across Scotland not so very long ago. It gave enormous and hugely resented power to housing-department officials and also, it should be remembered, occasioned real corruption.

Yet this side of the Border, the bonanza in council-house sales saw little political dividend for the Scottish Tories. Instead, their vote faltered in 1983, crashed in 1987 as they lost half their seats at Westminster, and a decade later they lost the lot.

The decline in Scottish Conservative fortunes, and the reasons for it, are complex, historic and long-standing, but rightto-buy did nothing to assuage it. This certainly proves an old adage that in politics, resentment is a far more powerful sentiment than gratitude.

It was droll that, even as every last Scottish Tory MP fell in 1997, they had finally won the political argument on right-tobuy, with neither New Labour nor the Liberal Democrats proposing to abolish legislation that had proved so popular.

Yet it would be silly to declare the sale of council houses an unmixed blessing. Inevitably the best houses in the nicest areas were snapped up first – not least in such 1930s gardencity estates as Glasgow’s Knightswood and Mosspark.

Then, over time, most of their new owners sold up and moved onwards and upwards. The result, inevitably and through three decades, has been the creation of sink-estates – great swathes of Scottish towns and cities where anyone with any get-up-and-go has got up and gone, leaving their semis and terraces and towers to an unemployed ( and l argely unemployable) underclass.

Meanwhile local authorities were forced to sell property to tenants not only on demand but at significant loss – well below market rates. And they were forbidden (save for the interesting exception of the Western Isles, where the Scottish Office recognised that the general housing stock was appalling) to use the revenue to build any new homes.

I am j ust old enough to remember when the new Knightswood Shopping Centre opened in 1972. It then seemed the last word in the retail experience – two pleasant supermarkets, boutiques, a greengrocer, a butcher, a bakery, abundant parking, shy young trees.

Graffiti

I sauntered by only in April, and it is unrecognisable – tired, shabby, covered in graffiti and with broken glass underfoot. There are several betting shops and a pawnbroker or two. An employment centre for single mums recently closed, while the last of the original businesses gave up the ghost in 2013.

It attests starkly to the social decline of an area, no longer family-friendly nor with any significant middle class – but is that entirely down to Mrs Thatcher’s bounty?

Ironically – and for all the SNP bluster about the glory of public housing – much council property in Glasgow, and elsewhere, stands empty. Most of the city’s high flats are condemned. In bleak eastern Edinburgh, such as Niddrie and Craigmillar, mean 1950s housi ng s chemes are l argely deserted.

In any case, blaming right-tobuy for the decline of districts and the collapse of community cohesion in postwar Scotland is more convenient than convincing. The erosion of an old, cosy urban Scotland was far under way by 1979, and acknowledged even by thoughtful observers from the Left.

‘What started the break-up of the old community and its close-knit spirit was the redevelopment plans of the Sixties,’ wrote Gorbals GP Patrick Connolly in 1982.

‘Despite the promises of a new home in their own area, many of my patients found themselves being posted out, like wagon-train settlers, to schemes on the periphery of the city. People now l ook towards the State as a prop rather than their family or their neighbours. The old way of working- class life has gone forever…’

The late Frank McElhone, a highly respected Glasgow politician, bluntly blamed the new towns such as Cumbernauld or East Kilbride – these, he thought, had steadily drawn away the more aspirational elements of Glasgow’s working class.

Meanwhile, it is easy to forget just how powerless and humiliated many Scots used to be at the hands of housing department mandarins. For all the fashionable deification of John Wheatley, reforming Labour Governments and so on, these men – as the historian TC Smout starkly relates – had all the life- defining, censorious power of any Beadle Bumble.

Smout notes how in Glasgow, ‘from the start, the council… perpetuated the ancient distinctions between the respectable and unrespectable poor: those whom council officials graded as clean and decent after formal inspection were entitled to “Ordinary” houses (at Knightswood): those who failed were given “Rehousing” houses and packed off to Blackhill, which, not surprisingly, rapidly developed a reputation for illness and violence that surpassed even that of the old slums themselves. A family sent to Blackhill was doomed as certainly, and as irretrievably, as a family sent to a Victorian poorhouse…’

An old Stornoway lady I know still remembers the mortification, 60 years ago, of the inter- view for council-house allocation, and how she flushed when her mother butted in, before her male inquisitors, to declare not only that she already had a baby but that ‘there’s another on the way!’

And then, besides, there were palms eager to be greased. In a fine anthology of Clydebank Blitz anecdotes, Charles Clunas wrote of his parents’ ordeal, after the bombing, at the hands of an official in Johnstone Council – a man they had personally known for 20 years and who was in charge of housing allocation.

Off to see him they had trooped and ‘when they came back, my father’s face was like thunder… It had apparently been put to them that if they were not prepared to produce some “key money” (a contemporary euphemism for a bribe) there was nothing doing.

Indignities

‘I remember the quotation still. “Lots of folk would like a council house, you know. Some would give fifty, aye, a hundred pounds for a council house.” Whoever he was, he had tried it on with the wrong man…’

Short of that enormity, there were other indignities. You were not allowed even to choose the colour of your own front door. You could not bequeath the tenancy to any relative (save your spouse). You were not compensated for, say, a nice new bathroom fitted at your own expense… and, if you died or moved on, that same bathroom would be blithely stripped out by council workmen, and re-equipped with the mean fittings of every other property under their control.

A great irony was that the right-to-buy was not even an original Tory idea. Labour had toyed seriously with the policy under the Callaghan government, sure i t was a votewinner, although it was, of course, blocked righteously by the deep Left. Meanwhile, resentment against public housing policy was as keen in Scotland as everywhere else.

But none of this counted yesterday. Right-to-buy has been scrapped without serious debate, or any cool, detached consideration of the issues involved – and not so much for itself as for its totemic associations with the Iron Lady and Basildon Man.

This may be delicious red meat for the more swivel-eyed SNP activists, or the mass of our MSPs self-consciously radicalised in the 1980s – but it is not prudent public policy, nor any way to run a government.