Labour Party supports Right to Buy to extend ‘wealth ownership’, Nandy says

Pressed on whether she would back a temporary suspension of the policy – under which homes in London are sold with a maximum discount of £127,900 and £96,000 in the rest of the country – she said: “What we’re not proposing to do is take away from people the right to access their own assets. In fact, we want to do the opposite: we want to extend wealth ownership, asset ownership, to people in every nation and region in this country.”

In her speech, she had said: “It’s little known that the Right to Buy, which has become a totemic issue for many on the left, was originally a Labour policy. It was a decision of the Thatcher government to fail to replace the council housing stock that was sold.”

Since the policy was launched in 1980, about two million council homes have been sold. An estimated 40% of them are now owned by private landlords who rent them out at much higher rates. 

When the Conservatives came to power in 2010, they promised to revamp the Right to Buy with increased discounts, but to replace every “additional” home sold on a one-for-one basis. 

Since then, 107,032 homes have been sold and 37,870 replacement homes have been started. Many of the replacements are smaller and for more expensive tenures than the social rented homes which were sold. 

The government recently changed the rules to allow councils to keep 100% of receipts from the sale of homes for two years.

Ms Nandy said today that Labour “agrees with the government” on this move. However, local authority figures contacted by Inside Housing said it was “too little, too late” and “is not going to solve the problem, compounded by decades of replacing housing stock lost through Right to Buy”.

In Wales, the Labour Party has scrapped the Right to Buy, and the Scottish National Party has also done so in Scotland. 

In her speech, Ms Nandy criticised calls for mortgage relief and rent control as prices soar. 

Several Labour mayors, including London’s Sadiq Khan, have called for powers to control rents. Ms Nandy previously said she was “personally very interested and attracted by the idea”, as “doing nothing is not an option”. 

Today, she said: “Targeted mortgage relief that fuels the inflation crisis is no substitute for stabilising the economy and getting interest rates under control.

“And when housebuilding is falling off a cliff and buy-to-let landlords are leaving the market, rent controls that cut rents for some will almost certainly leave others homeless. 

“It might be politically easy to put a sticking plaster on our deep-seated problems. But if it’s cowardice that got us here, it is never going to get us out.”

In her speech, she repeated previously announced Labour policies to reintroduce housing targets and review the green belt for developable industrial land.

Turning on critics from the left of the Labour Party who have called for a clearer focus on social housing and less emphasis on boosting homeownership, she said: “Frankly, I was astonished by the reaction of some people in my own party, who said that this was ‘Tory-lite’ and not a Labour thing to do. 

“They argued homeownership and social housing were a zero-sum game, and we were making the wrong choice. Well, to those people I say, ‘You couldn’t be more wrong’. 

“The biggest and most consequential divide in Britain today is between the people and communities who hold assets and those who don’t. 

“If you want people to have real resilience in their lives, they need the assets that sustain them and help them weather hard times, and offer choices and chances when times are good.”

Asked if Labour would guarantee a rent settlement for housing providers if it won the next election, she added: “I think there’s been a level of disingenuousness from the government on social rents. 

“We share their aim to keep social rents low and to cap the rent increases. People are really struggling at the moment. They’re struggling to put food on the table for their kids and we should be doing everything that we can to help. 

“But clearly that has a major impact on the ability of social landlords to do some of the things that the government is also urging them to do.

“We will always call out those people who treat their tenants badly in the social sector or the private sector.

“Frankly, if you’re telling a family that the damp and mould in the home is due to their lifestyle choices, you have no business being in public service, I’m really clear about that. 

“But what we won’t do is pretend that there isn’t a major funding issue for the things that we’re asking social landlords to do, and we’re committed to working with housing associations and councils in order to try and find creative ways to reverse this.”

She added that the Labour Party would “inherit the worst economic situation since the Second World War”, but added that it’s “moments like this, when everything is so fundamentally broken, that real change becomes not just possible, but inevitable”. 

“We’re determined to get on the front foot and start fixing the fundamentals, not just tinkering around the edges,” she said.