Boris Johnson is unlikely to match Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ revolution

theguardian.com:

Talk that Boris Johnson will offer many of England’s housing association tenants the possibility of buying their homes will remind older voters of Margaret Thatcher’s council house sell-off which saw around 2 million households join her pursuit of a “property-owning democracy”. Younger voters might also remember the idea has appeared in both the 2015 and 2019 Tory manifestos without ever being implemented.

There are 4.4m affordable homes of varying kinds in England, but the sheer complexity of selling off property that is not in public ownership and the cost to the taxpayer of subsidising sales that could exceed £1bn a year are among the reasons such a sell-off has never happened. Add to that widespread concerns that the policy will only deplete England’s already scant affordable housing stock while the sector estimates 4.2 million people are in need, and the chances of the PM repeating the seismic property revolution delivered by Thatcher’s gambit look slim.

Even by this government’s own estimates, a fully operating right to buy for housing association tenants is only likely to result in the sale of around 224,000 homes in a decade. Most tenants simply cannot afford to buy. The potential political gain, beyond the soundbite, is therefore considerably smaller.

As Toby Lloyd, Theresa May’s former housing adviser adds, with the rise of private renting, offering affordable housing tenants tens of thousands of pounds in sale discounts could create tension with private renters paying higher rent for similar properties. It would create a clear sense of injustice.

There is, of course, an obvious attraction for families who do get the discount. A pilot in the Midlands that launched in 2018 found that those who managed to buy