In the 1980s my family, like so many others, benefited from the Right- to-Buy scheme. This scheme enabled people to buy their council house from the council. Now, however, many people live in Housing Association owned properties rather than Council owned properties. People who live in Housing Association properties aren’t able to buy their houses so easily because the Right-to-Buy does not apply to Housing Association properties.
1.1 million of them in total have some sort of right to buy because their properties either used to belong to the Council or because they have been built with public funds.
However, that still leaves 500,000 people with no right to buy. And this number will grow because many new developments, like the Springfield Hospital site, will see Housing Association tenants have no right to buy.
Labour introduced a scheme called Social Homebuy in 2006 to try to fix this problem.. From an initial and very modest target to help only 5,000 households across the UK per year, so far they have managed to help a paltry 138 in total. Their scheme has been a miserable and costly failure.
Mark Clarke is calling for local housing association tenants to be given a proper and simple Right-to-Buy style scheme to allow them to buy their own home. This would allow hundreds of local people in Tooting to get their first step on the property ladder