The Government has made significant changes to the Right to Buy scheme (“Reinvigorating Right to Buy and One for One Replacement, Information for Local Authorities”) with the aim of increasing take up and ensuring a ‘one-for-one’ replacement of social housing sold under the scheme. Key features of the changes are:

The Right to Buy scheme has been one of the iconic public policies of the last thirty years. Whilst, council house sales took place before it is synonymous with Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. At the time of its introduction Michael Heseltine described the Right to Buy as “an irreversible shift of wealth in favour of working people and away from the state”. If it was introduced today, David Cameron would probably describe it as part of his ‘Big Society’. However, despite their criticism of the Labour Government’s reforms to the scheme which the Conservatives saw, not entirely correctly, as leading sales to drop to barely a few thousand a year, there was no commitment in either their 2010 Election Manifesto or the Coalition Agreement to reverse those changes.