Who really won in the battle over right to buy?

David Cameron’s key policy theme in his conference speech was housing, and it included the announcement that the government is accepting housing associations’ offer of a voluntary extension of the right-to-buy to their tenants that allows them to avoid legislation. The Prime Minister said:

‘And in our manifesto, we announced a breakthrough policy: extending the Right to Buy to housing association tenants. Some people said this would be impossible. Housing associations would never stand for it. The legislation would never pass.

‘Let me tell you something. Greg Clark, our brilliant Communities Secretary, has secured a deal with housing associations to give their tenants the Right to Buy their home. That will mean the first tenants can start to buy their homes from next year.’

The National Housing Federation drew up this offer because implementing the right to buy without legislation would protect housing associations’ charitable status. Legislation might have tipped the balance for the organisations to be considered public bodies, which would have put their debt on the public sector balance sheet, but also made their assets available to ministers. And the NHF concluded that the support for this measure meant registered social landlords had no choice but to implement the right to buy in one form or another.

But intriguingly I understand from those with a good understanding both of the policy and of the parliamentary dynamic on this that there were enough Tory MPs worried about this policy to make legislating on it impossible. If that were so, then the NHF may have blinked without needing to. The umbrella body for housing associations saw that this was a manifesto commitment and concluded that it would be pointless to try to block it. But then so was human rights reform, and not many in the party really expect anything at all meaty on that before 2020, given the size of the revolt against that set of reforms. Perhaps the Tories have benefitted from the fragility of their power in parliament not yet becoming clear.