‘Continuing with Right to Buy is a vote for profit over people, for landlords over tenants, and for an unsustainable housing future’

IT is a peculiar quirk of the Alice in Wonderland world we live in that our council is busily selling off its most dilapidated housing stock so it can buy-back homes it was forced to sell off under Right to Buy, (Revealed: Hundreds of council flats standing unused amid housing crisis, November 7).

Even the most vehement critic of the hated housing policy, when it was brought in by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, would not have envisaged this plot twist.

Right to Buy is a disastrous relic that has crippled our social housing stock, fuelled inequality and created a broken housing market where affordability is no more than a distant dream for most.

If Keir Starmer had any guts, he’d ban it and preserve the remaining social housing stock for future generations.

Originally marketed as a tool for social mobility, Right to Buy has stripped the country of more than two million council homes, funnelled public resources into private hands and starved local authorities of the assets they need to provide affordable housing.

Councils were forbidden from reinvesting the proceeds from sales into building new homes. Promises of replacing homes lost through the scheme have rung hollow.

This blatant and sustained depletion of affordable housing over the years is a fundamental cause of today’s housing crisis. It has failed the very people it was meant to support.

Far from helping hardworking families, it has fuelled a private rental sector where former council homes are now rented out at market prices by private landlords who charge unaffordable rents to the very people who should have been housed affordably.

It’s a cruel irony that housing built with public money is now generating private profits, often subsidised further by housing benefits – a vicious cycle that the public pays for twice.

The real winners are not the tenants who bought their homes decades ago, but a minority of wealthy property owners.

Ask many tenants who “got on the ladder” and they will talk about surprisingly extortionate bills.

For everyone else, Right to Buy has simply meant higher rents, longer waiting lists, and near-impossible odds of finding affordable housing. And the situation worsens every year.

We must enable councils to retain the assets they currently own and reinvest in social housing.

Continuing with Right to Buy is a vote for profit over people, for landlords over tenants, and for an unsustainable housing future.

Labour is blathering on about its housing reforms as a solution to the crisis. But will anything they are proposing make a real difference to the people who need it most?

It’s time to recognise that Right to Buy has failed the public, failed councils, and failed the nation. It’s time to ban it outright.