The public won’t buy Right to Buy

David Cameron's Right to Buy policy scored good headlines but the public won't buy it.

(Photo By Other than this guy. Photo:Getty)

Earlier this week, David Cameron announced the Conservative Party’s flagship election policy: to extend the Right to Buy to housing association tenants. The discounts, it was explained, would be funded by selling off high-value council houses. Scoring every national paper’s front page (bar The Mirror) was certainly the PR coup that that Conservative Party was looking for, but more in-depth analysis has been mixed. Will this policy stand the, albeit short, test of time between now and polling day?

I hope not. I don’t think that voters will buy it for three reasons: unlike politicians the general public understand that this nation’s housing crisis’ roots lie in the shortage of homes, particularly affordable homes; the public have also been told time and time again to keep the faith that we’re midway through a programme of austerity; and, the public will recognise that it is wholly unfair.

Our polling shows that 8 in 10 members of the public believe that there is a housing crisis in this country. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they don’t think that an extension of the Right to Buy policy is the answer. Just 16% think extending Right to Buy to housing associations is good way to tackle the affordability crisis, in comparison to 46% who want the Government to give more public money to housing associations and councils to build more affordable homes that will benefit more people.

Swathes of the public will almost certainly not ‘buy’ this policy, especially those millions of people in private rented homes who are desperate to buy but have no hope of doing so, nor the three million adult children living with their parents because they can’t afford to rent or buy. Little wonder then that 60% of the public believe that it would be unfair for social housing tenants to get a discount to buy their home while private renters do not.

The £17.5bn the Conservatives are planning to raise to fund the discount is enough for housing associations to build nearly one million shared ownership homes open to everyone, not just the lucky few already well housed in secure social homes. That would be a far better way of meeting the nation’s housing aspirations and ambitions than this policy.