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London borough buys back 117 ex-council homes
A London council has purchased 117 homes after receiving funding through the mayor’s Right to Buy-back scheme.
Since February 2022, Lewisham Council has been buying back former council homes sold through the Right to Buy, to house families on its waiting list.
Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister at the time, introduced the Right to Buy for council tenants in the 1980s.
By 1997, more than 1,700,000 homes in the UK had been sold under the scheme.
According to Shelter, the homelessness charity, only 5% of the social housing sold under the Right to Buy has been replaced.
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The mayor of London’s scheme, launched in July 2021 to boost housing supply, gives boroughs the funds to buy former council homes that had been sold into the private market through the Right to Buy programme.
Homes purchased through the Right to Buy-back fund can either be let at social rent levels or used as accommodation for homeless families.
Lewisham first announced plans to buy back up to 100 council homes in late 2021, after securing funding from the Greater London Authority (GLA).
The council later received additional funding to buy up to 20 more homes.
Damien Egan, the mayor of Lewisham, said: “Through this funding from Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, we’ve been able to buy 117 former council homes and use them as they were intended to be used: to provide long-term family homes for Lewisham residents.”
A spokesperson for the council said it could not share the cost of its buy-back programme because of commercial sensitivities.
Last year, the GLA revealed that, between July and August 2021, 14 boroughs were allocated £152m to purchase 1,577 market homes through the scheme.
In December 2021, Hounslow Council received nearly £39m to purchase 555 homes through the Right to Buy-back scheme.
It was the second borough to be granted funding. Islington had been allocated funds to buy back 80 homes three months earlier.
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