Labour will keep Right To Buy in England if it wins election

Labour says it will keep the controversal Right To Buy policy in England if it wins this year’s General Election.

This is despite R2B already having been abolished by the Labour government in Wales and the SNP-Green administration in Scotland.

In an interview in the Financial Times, Labour’s shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook says that R2B discounts would be slashed to a fraction of those which exist now for council tenants, and that tenants would have to wait longer to become eligible to buy.

Currently tenants in a council-owned property can buy it at a discount of up to 70 per cent of its market value, depending on the length of their tenancy, up to a maximum of £96,000 in most of England and £127, 900 in London.

However, the prospect of big discounts and therefore big profits if they sell, has been a permanent shadow over Right To Buy - and ironically many of those properties purchased this way have found their way into the private rental sector, having been snapped up by landlords.

Pennycook tells the FT: “We are going to slash the discounts/ They’d get the discounts they got in 2012.”

He continues: “We don’t like what we’ve seen since 2012 when they [Conservatives] increased the discount massively and now you have lots of people negotiating deals with private landlords, selling off properties and renting them back to the local authority and we are all paying housing benefit on it.”

You can read the full article here but it is likely to be behind a paywall for many.