2 weeks Ago By Anna White
In the 1970s, my grandparents moved from a council house in Hartlepool to one in Welwyn Garden City. In 1987, they bought that terraced house with the help of Margaret Thatcher’s flagship housing policy Right to Buy, which enabled council tenants to purchase their property at a big discount. Three years on, when house prices were rising, they flipped it, bought a house in Milton Keynes on the mainstream market, and funded their retirement and a trip around the world.
This was what Right to Buy was meant to be all about: social mobility. It fed the political rhetoric of the time: that with homeownership came independence and self-reliance – “the bedrock of a free society”, in the words of Michael Heseltine. Forty years on and, rather than feeling empowered, many households in Britain are either trapped by their housing costs or shut out of home ownership altogether.
When Right to Buy was launched as part of the Housing Act 1980, 55% of households were homeowners. The figure peaked at 72% in the early 2000s and has fallen back to 65% – hardly the “property-led democracy” that Thatcher has pictured..
