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I thought a major reason was Thatcher letting people who should not be owning a house buy one at a cut price?

• matthewmacleod 12y ago
  No - 'right to buy' is not related to the UK's housing crisis, aside from the fact it depleted social housing stock (which is a separate issue that should not have been allowed to happen). Offering cut-price sales of social property to council tenants is an amazingly powerful tool for giving people ownership over their communities.
  • pjc50 12y ago
    Depletion of the social housing stock was an explicit objective of the policy. It was part of a transfer of power from the labour-controlled ""collectivist"" councils. That's why they were prevented from spending the revenue on new housebuilding. It gives people ownership of their houses, not their communities. It's a micro version of the general privatisation problem of selling public assets at a discount for the benefit of private interests; it's just a variant that everyone's allowed a crack at, like the royal mail shares.
• arethuza 12y ago
  "who should not be owning a house" I think that's a bit harsh - my wife's parents bought their house under the Thatcher Right to Buy scheme and they were both hard working and financially prudent - they could have purchased a house but it wasn't what skilled working class people did in Glasgow so they didn't do it for cultural, not financial, reasons. People used to joke that you could tell council houses where the owners had purchased because they had a new front door - and that is true - people look after property a lot more when it's there and whole neighborhoods have been improved that way. What I do think was wrong with the Right to Buy Scheme was that it didn't spend the money raised on building new social housing.