The government’s proposed clampdown on the Right to Buy council homes will significantly blunt the impact of the policy, a think tank predicts. 

But it says the government still faces a huge task in replenishing Britain’s affordable housing stock with 400,000 more properties needed, at a cost of £50 billion, just to get back to 2010 levels of sub-market rent homes.

The Resolution Foundation’s latest report examines Right to Buy which has enabled over two million tenants to buy their properties since the policy was introduced in 1980.

The report notes that the RtB was abolished in Scotland and Wales in 2016 and 2019 respectively, while proposed legislation – for which a consultation closes today – will further limit its impact on England. 

Changes include tweaking the discount formula, and increasing the numbers of years tenants must have lived in their home to qualify from three up to ten years. As a result, around 500,000 fewer tenants would be currently eligible to buy their own council homes.

In practice however, the Foundation says that RtB purchases have already fallen to just 11,000 in 2022-23. 

Some 62% of England’s remaining social housing stock is owned by housing associations, and therefore not eligible for the original RtB scheme. And with nearly two in five tenants in homes that are still eligible for RtB apparently living in poverty, it’s unlikely that they have the savings or income required to purchase their property.

The report says that the proposal to exempt new-build homes from the RtB is much more important to future-proof the social housing stock from the dramatic sell-offs of the 1980s, particularly if the building of social housing increases as the government has promised.

Right to Buy has been a divisive policy. While popular among tenants and politicians, the foundation claims the policy has contributed to a decline in the UK’s affordable housing stock, which has fallen from a peak 5.5m in the 1970s to just 4.1m today, despite huge population growth over this period.

And while the policy is supposed to boost home ownership, Freedom of Information requests have found that over 40% of homes purchased under the scheme have ended up in the hands of private landlords.