Defend Council Housing: If you vote for the Tories’ right to buy, where will your children live?
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If you vote for the Tories’ right to buy, where will your children live?
‘As homes with social rents vanished, growing numbers of Britons were forced to pay higher private rents that were often unaffordable.’ Photograph: Mark Kerrison/Demotix/Corbis
The Tories’ cynical manifesto pledge to sell off housing association homes will trash people’s aspirations, not reward them
‘As homes with social rents vanished, growing numbers of Britons were forced to pay higher private rents that were often unaffordable.’ Photograph: Mark Kerrison/Demotix/Corbis
This is the column I am supposed to write; it’s all part of the Tory game plan. The Conservatives’ proposal to flog off housing association homeshas nothing to do with meeting people’s urgent and increasingly desperate housing needs.
The aims are threefold. First, with home ownership at a three-decade low – thanks to the government’s failure to build homes and, ironically, the legacy of right to buy – the Tories bank on tenants believing this policy could be their only chance to buy a home, turning them into grateful Conservative voters. Second, it is great news for private landlords: in one London borough surveyed, around 40% of homes sold off under right to buy have ended up under the ownership of a private landlord, and one lucky beneficiary is the son of Margaret Thatcher’s housing minister, who owns more than 40 ex-council properties. And third, it is intended to provoke a backlash from Labour and the left that allows them to be painted as anti-aspiration, with columns such as these.
Derby People's Assembly 