Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is said to be planning on watering down the right-to-buy scheme which enables council tenants to purchase their homes from local authorities at a significantly reduced price. The policy, famously introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, has helped many thousands of families become home-owners, giving them greater security and a stake in their local communities. But councils are keen to cut the cost of Thatcher’s flagship policy. As a result, Rayner – who once blasted her opponents as Tory ‘scum’ – is considering axing the scheme for newly built council houses and cutting the discount offered to existing tenants. While Downing Street has insisted the policy won’t be scrapped altogether, the government is considering tightening up the rules dramatically in the coming weeks.
The whiff of hypocrisy is strong enough to knock you over
The whiff of hypocrisy is strong enough to knock you over. Back in 2007, Rayner took advantage of this very scheme to buy her former council house in Stockport, Greater Manchester at a 25 per cent discount. She paid £79,000, before selling the property on later at a profit of £48,500. But do feel free to pull the ladder up after yourself, minister. If Rayner follows through on the plans, she will be taking a similar approach to fellow Labour MP Diane Abbott who condemned Tony Blair for not sending his children to traditional state schools, before opting to send her own son to a private school.
If Thatcher’s scheme is indeed trashed by someone who benefited from it, don’t be surprised. Indeed, Rayner won’t be alone: I’ve seen a similar story play out in the life of one of my acquaintances. Let’s call her Denise. Now aged 73, Denise was a teacher in a state primary school; her husband had worked in social services. Back in the late 1970s, they moved into an area of north London which at the time was a bit dodgy. They were able to rent a good-sized council house in which to raise their two children. Then, sometime in the 1980s, right-to-buy meant they could acquire the house at a highly favourable price; it was their only means of entering the property market.
Fast forward a few decades and their neighbourhood – as is the way with so much of London – has since become well and truly gentrified. It’s even got a Gail’s. The four-bedroom terraced house which they snapped up for a song four decades ago is now worth just shy of two million smackers. When Denise and her hubby sold up last year, it meant they could afford to buy a down-sized house for themselves further afield, along with a London flat apiece for their two children (now in their forties), who had hitherto been unable to get on the property ladder. In a nutshell, Thatcher’s policy had provided the entire family with financial security.
Although a lifelong left-winger whose views have been shaped by the Guardian (let’s face it, like most teachers in our state system), you’d think Denise might at least acknowledge this debt owed to the Iron Lady. But not a bit of it. As far as she is concerned, Maggie was and remains a hate figure par excellence. She was the politician who destroyed the otherwise wonderful social fabric of this country. She made the City institutions nasty and competitive. She destroyed the old coal mining communities (as if they’d still be happily mining coal today). And so on…
I got to know Denise’s daughter quite well, a good-natured woman with a wry take on her upbringing. ‘Mum wouldn’t let me have a Barbie doll,’ she once told me, ‘as it represented to her the evils of American capitalism. And if you wanted a quiet life you’d do well not to mention the name of Margaret Thatcher. It would just set her off on a rant, with steam coming out of her ears!’
But if she deplored everything that Thatcher represented, perhaps she should have been principled enough to spurn the opportunity the Iron Lady gave her to buy her council house. I guess when it comes right down to it, self-interest trumps even the most strongly-held convictions.
As regards right-to-buy, it may well need reforming, as the scheme is presently open to abuse and councils have indeed failed to replenish their housing stocks after selling many off. But the answer isn’t to dump the scheme, along with pensioners’ winter fuel allowance. It’s to build more houses.
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