Thread by @docrussjackson

So it looks like home-ownership began to get harder when average house prices started diverging from average pay in May 1998. 🤔

In other news, Peter Mandelson first said that the New Labour government was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” in October 1998. 🧐

https://twitter.com/TaniaDoney/status/1490359403752661004

In 2011 40,000 English socially rented homes were built. By 2017, just 5,900 social housing homes were completed - the smallest proportion ever. In England in 2019, just 37,825 new homes were built for letting at discounted rents. The waiting list is over 1.1 million households.

The 1980 Housing Act gave five million council house tenants in England & Wales the Right to Buy.

Gerald Kaufman said the Act would "not provide a single new home & [would] deprive many homeless people or families living in tower blocks from getting suitable accommodation".

The Act allowed tenants who had lived in their homes for at least three years to buy at 33% discount of the market price and 44% for a flat.

If one was a tenant for over 20 years they got a 50% discount. Those not allowed to buy were tenants of charitable housing associations.

The Housing Act 1980 also gave those who paid a £100 deposit the right to buy their home at a fixed price in a period of two years after paying the deposit. If the tenant was to sell the home they bought under the Act within five years, they would have to share the capital gain.

Home ownership grew from 55% of the population in 1980 to 64% in 1987.

By the time Thatcher left office in 1990, it was 67%.

1.5 million council houses were sold by 1990, by 1995 it was 2.1 million, & as a result of the Right to Buy the Treasury received £28 billion.

Proponents of the Right to Buy argue it gave working-class council tenants opportunities to get on the property ladder which they would not otherwise had had without the Act. By 2015-16, home ownership had declined from a high of 71% in 2003, to 63%, the lowest level since 1985.

Around one third of ex-council homes are owned by wealthy landlords. Speculators have made millions out of exploiting public assets.

In 2013 it was reported that Charles Gow, son of Thatcher’s housing minister, bought 40 of 120 former council flats in one project in Roehampton.

Many tenants who had purchased their council flats, sold them to speculators/investors/property companies, & by 2013, some one-bedroom council flats that sold for £50,000 in the early 1990s, had a market price of £250,000, while construction of new homes dramatically decreased.