Right to Buy: Shelter or Status?
While ‘Right to Buy’ was portrayed as a tool for increasing social mobility, it has ingrained inequalities in the housing system, and propagated the hidden voices of neoliberal ideology which have embedded the value of individual responsibility deep within the nation psyche.
Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ categorises shelter as a physiological need, part of the fundamental requirements for sustaining human life. It is difficult to question this logic: access to stable, reliable and safe housing is unavoidably intrinsic to survival, as well as to achieving a high quality of life. But what of the specific goal of homeownership?
Council houses on Chapel Lane, Hadfield, Derbyshire - via Wikimedia Commons
Thatcher’s 1980 policy of ‘Right to Buy’, which sought to increase the rate of homeownership by enabling the discounted purchase of council houses by their tenants was framed as aiming to create a more egalitarian society where social mobility was prioritised. Nevertheless, the policy entrenched fundamental flaws within the British housing system, both by failing to reduce housing inequalities and by perpetuating a harmful ideology of individual responsibility which has weakened the sense of community among the British people. Therefore, to successfully confront the entrenched flaws in modern Britain's housing system, a more nuanced understanding of ‘Right to Buy’ is needed. The true legacy of ‘Right to Buy’ is not a more equitable housing system, but instead a system distorted by the hidden voices of Thatcherism that have transferred wealth from the state to small groups of private individuals, and contributed to the loss of a sense of community and reciprocal relationship between the people and the state.
“The true legacy of ‘Right to Buy’ is not a more equitable housing system, but instead a system distorted by the hidden voices of Thatcherism that have transferred wealth from the state to small groups of private individuals…”
‘Right to Buy’ was instituted in Thatcher’s first government, as part of the Housing Act of 1980. The policy enabled council house tenants the opportunity to purchase their home from the council with a discount of up to 70% from the market value of the property. Therefore, it aimed to increase the rate of homeownership in Britain by enabling working class people to buy properties at a lower rate.
Superficially, this policy appeared to have been successful in its overt aim of increasing the level of homeownership. By 1997, 1.7 million houses had been bought through this scheme. For the 1.7 million households who used this scheme, there is a clear immediate personal benefit, both in terms of the economic asset obtained and the social respect garnered by becoming a homeowner. Nonetheless, while this policy was touted as offering the chance for personal advancement to the most disadvantaged of society, its egalitarian foundations can be challenged. It is worth remembering that in 1980, 1 out of 3 households were publicly owned – thus, the people living in council houses were not a monolith of the poorest of society, but included some range of wealth levels. Consequently, those who were able to take advantage of ‘Right to Buy’ tended to be more well off (their incomes were on average twice those of households who did not engage with ‘Right to Buy’), more likely to be middle aged, more likely to live in the South and East of England, and more likely to be nuclear, dual income families, rather than single parents or young people. Therefore, this opportunity for social advancement was limited to those with greater economic power from its inception.
Furthermore, the egalitarianism of ‘Right to Buy’ can also be challenged when considering how beneficial the policy was for those who were able to use the policy. Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for the Environment, emphasised the success of the policy by calling it the largest transfer of wealth from the state to the people.Nevertheless, nowadays much of the property transferred to the private sector through ‘Right to Buy’ has ended up in the hands of private landlords. In cities like Brighton, a shocking 86% of the houses bought under the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme have ultimately become private rental properties. One of the most egregious examples of this obvious injustice can be found in a report by the New Economics Foundation, who claim that Charles Gow, son of Ian Gow, who was Housing Minister under Thatcher for two years, is the landlord of 40 former council houses originally bought through ‘Right to Buy’ in South London. Therefore, ‘Right to Buy’ seems more like a transfer of wealth from the state to small sections of society for personal gain, rather than a policy which has fairly distributed property and wealth through society. It's a perfect example of neoliberal policy which disingenuously promises greater opportunity for the working class while primarily enriching the wealthiest of society, hollowing out egalitarian ideals and deepening inequalities.
Thatcher at a news conference in 1987, Levan Ramishvili via Flickr
While ‘Right to Buy’ helped some working class people become homeowners, it was also fundamentally linked with reducing the duty of the state to provide social housing. Local councils were obliged to sell properties at a loss due to state mandated discounts. Therefore, after 1980, there was both a lack of incentive and a reduction in the capabilities of councils to build more social housing. Consequently, the rise in homeownership following ‘Right to Buy’ was paralleled by a dramatic fall in the supply of council houses, as existing stock was rapidly transferred to the private market, and there was no serious effort to rejuvenate this supply. Overall, less than 5% of the properties sold through ‘Right to Buy’ have been replaced. While it is obvious that more homeowners means less people in need of council housing, this balance is disrupted by population growth, leading to a shortage in council housing. This was half-heartedly addressed by the 2010 coalition government, who promised to replace each council house sold through ‘Right to Buy’ at a ratio of 1:1 – a promise which, in the signature style of the coalition government, was never met. Therefore, while there were 6.5 million units of social housing in 1979, by 2017 this number had dramatically fallen to 2 million. In practice, therefore, 'Right to Buy' has functioned as a government rejection of their responsibility to provide decent social housing opportunities to the most in need of society. Despite the superficial deployment of the rhetoric of egalitarianism in the idea of working class people being given the chance to own property, it is a foundational part of the retrenchment of the welfare state and the breakdown of the notion of the reciprocal relationship between the government and the people.
“While ‘Right to Buy’ helped some working class people become homeowners, it was also fundamentally linked with reducing the duty of the state to provide social housing.”
The concept of the hidden voices of Thatcherism pervasively shaping the current housing system can be considered more abstractly in terms of the values and attitudes it has embedded within the British people. Thatcher’s use of the rhetoric of personal responsibility contributed to the increased alienation and stigmatisation of those who remained council house tenants. With social advancement framed as something that had been placed in the hands of the individual through 'Right to Buy', those who were unable to buy their council houses were seen as having personally failed, as having shirked their chance to become individually responsible for their own advancement by taking advantage of the opportunities given to them. The policy can be seen as one of the most compelling examples of how Thatcherite ideology pervasively warped social attitudes towards housing and, more expansively, towards social advancement, by embedding the value of individual responsibility and framing improving one’s quality of life as something achieved personally, rather than through the assistance of the state. In this way, the policy is emblematic of Thatcherite ideology, through its focus on signifiers of individual material prosperity and its atomisation of the advancement of working class people. As social mobility was reconfigured as a specifically individual endeavour, based solely upon the household unit and with limited assistance from the state, ‘Right to Buy’ significantly contributed to the fading potency of the notion of “community” in British society.
The consequences of 'Right to Buy' have been profound, both in terms of the damage it has done to the housing system in the UK, and in how it has consolidated the place of Thatcherite values in modern society. Although 'Right to Buy' has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, and some political figures have called for its end in England, it has generally received scant attention by both the previous and current governments. Furthermore, increasing home ownership levels remain a political priority for all parties – take, for instance, Labour’s efforts to portray themselves as the ‘party of aspiration’ leading up to the General Election. The same playbook of glorifying the pursuit of homeownership and decreasing access to social housing, thus stigmatising it, has been passed along through successive governments. This is testament to the intractable legacy of 'Right to Buy' in cementing homeownership as the primary social signifier of prosperity, and thus narrowing the scope of housing policy to vague aims to increase homeownership.
In many ways, this is inevitable. I find theories about cooperative housing schemes which distance themselves from the ultimate ideal of individual home ownership compelling, but I question whether Britain can rid itself of its obsession with home ownership and move towards a feasible alternative. It is one thing to recognise how universal homeownership has been unsuccessfully pursued by successive governments at the expense of neglecting a decaying council housing system and reinforcing inequalities. However, it is quite another to undo its continued resounding appeal to the vast majority of people in the UK.
Some political commentators have a bad habit of decrying policies which boost the individual prosperity of some working class people as “bribes” which steal voters away from leftist politics by promising them middle class dreams under a Conservative government. I find this rhetoric patronising and self defeating: although I have spent this article criticising 'Right to Buy', I can understand the importance it had for people who were able to buy their council house through the scheme. Therefore, government action to resolve the housing crisis must contend with the ubiquity of the dream of homeownership that 'Right to Buy' has created. Nevertheless, it must have a far more egalitarian foundation than Thatcher’s housing policy, and ensure it benefits the majority of working class people rather than aiding the self advancement of landlords, as previous incarnations of the policy have done. Furthermore, governments should not be myopically focused on boosting levels of homeownership while neglecting to ensure the stability and high quality of council housing.