AIBU to totally disagree with 'the right to buy'?

When a family member was given a Housing Assiciation house after a divorce - his wife had the house - he was a good tenant - so after a number of years he received a letter telling him he was now eligible to buy the house at a discount. When he said that he would buy it the association then said they would rather help him buy a house he chose - they in effect paid the deposit but kept an interest in the house - which only he could live in and when it was sold they had their money returned with some interest.
This method allowed him to buy in the area and a house he liked and was suitable - none was lost from housing stocks and the association was part owners of a well maintained house which they did not need to fund the improvements and then received a small profit.

Immigrants to blame again, eh, peaseblossom.

www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/jan/25/is-immigration-causing-the-uk-housing-crisis

Don't suppose you'll read this, but it's not true.

You are also wrong about the amount of land built on for housing.
Of course, if we didn't allow middle eatern and Russian billionaires to buy up all the expensive blocks in London, we could solve the London housing crisis.

By the way, you also seem to have forgotten that many of those immigrants have actually helped to build the houses.

Sounds a reasonable idea, Welshwife. Housing associations aren't cheap rent any more. They have to charge economic rents.
In two months time there are going to be lots of HA residents who are not going to be able to afford their rents because the government is cutting the amount of housing benefit.
It's going to be frightening. They are not all immigrants.

No your not being unreasonable at all . I didn't know that about Arthur Scargil if he can afford a £2million property then surely he can afford to buy a less expensive private sale property however there's probably more to that story. I live in council property and if I won any monies under £100,000 (only way I could afford property ) I couldn't afford to buy private so yes I would buy my council home to give my children at least some inheritance as at this rate they'll have nothing BUT we definitely need to build more HA and CC houses

Social tenant payers have probably not been paying anything like as much as they would if they had a mortgage and all the other costs of owning the home.
But let's close down the NHS and most of London as well Peaseblossom. The immigrants are only here because the economy (and the NHS) needs them. That being so, having a government that brings home building to the lowest level for many decades, pretty much stops the building of social housing and tries to extend right to buy is just plain bad government. Along with the Help to Buy scheme that gives a 10% subsidy to people who can afford a big mortgage. (or a subsidy to the house builders, as some would have it).
Most EU migrants do not come her to settle - they are young and they just want to rent in the private sector. i dread to think what kind of awful overcrowded accommodation many are living in in London - if you work in a coffee shop or restaurant, what kind of rent can you afford?

I am new on here, just started reading and posting today. It is early days for me, but what alot of vitriol I have seen so far, even directed to individual posters . I do hope it isn't always like this?

Shanma, WElcome and, no, it isn't always like this, try some of the other threads. There is one on 'Why I like Gransnet'. It will tell you about all the other threads where we offer help, advice and support to each other, and make friends.

Political issues do get rather heated, but then, that is politics and even at our snippiest, we are angels of restraint compared with the language used on many other sites.

Maybe if council were able to build more single and or double person accomodation many more family homes could be released .I also know of two council houses where for one reason or another the family have left /died and the one person remaining (in 3 bedroomed property s) refuses to move .This surely shouldnt be allowed to happen when so many families are homeless ?

There's been a lot of posts citing immmigration as a major factor in the housing shortage but no mention of the overheating effect of the huge amount of buy to let properties shrinking housing stock and pushing up prices and rents. Back in the day you could have one mortgage and that was it. Now greedy individuals hold 'portfolios' sometimes of hundreds of properties. And don't let's be fooled into thinking they're all good honourable landlords taking care of their tenants homes. There's been a large increase in good tenants being evicted because they've dared to ask for severe problems to be sorted and the landlords not interested in spending money on essential repairs because they know there's a queue of desperate people just waiting and willing to step into the tenants shoes.

Still aliveandk. Was it ever any different?

Including Tony Blair, patriciageegee. 27 flats to rent out in the North West. I assume they are also renting out some of the ten houses they have between them.

I have always been against this Maggie Thatcher idea. The posters on here explained the problems this piece of legislaton has done to ruin our social housing stock.

The people most needing social housing are those who could not afford to buy council housing.

Well we bought our council house not apologising for it either, we moved into a brand new house in 1977, lovely neighbours, children in our little square all grew up together.Then people decided to move away what did we get in there place people selling drugs, young mums with new boyfriends each week, fighting, houses broken into we stuck as long as we could and what they offered us for an exchange I can't even mention what we were offered. We lived in it 23years, so we put into buy it, 3 years after we bought it we were allowed to sell it, so we did we downsized into a lovely apartment the children had left anyway, and a few years later paid of our mortage that lovely little estate is now a no go area.

My mother was given the chance to buy her council house, many years ago now, probably when the scheme started. She would have got the maximum discount as she had been in it for many years. It was under £20,000. She expected us to lend her the money as " it will come to you when I die". We refused as we realised my H would be rung every week with jobs needing doing and also paying for any costly repairs would be down to us. She went into residential care for the last 7 years of her life and the house would have to be sold to pay fees. We would have lost it all. I do not agree with right to buy, it is responsible for the private rental market that exists today with people making fortunes.

Duramjen this Trust has Trust in its title.

I think the Right to buy was daylight robbery from the taxpayers on a massive scale. The council houses were built and paid for by the taxpayers and the Tories just sold them off as cheap as they could not even giving the money back to the councils. The Tories have always ripped the taxpayers off big time for years to feather their own next, they have sold off almost all that there is to sell always way below the true value. We the consumer are the ones who end up paying in the long-run. Not content with that George Osborne even done deals with multi national firms like Google and Costa Coffee so they would not have to pay their full tax bill. My sister in law brought her parents 4 bed council house for £38,000 after her dad died her mother moved into a granny flat in my son and daughter-in-laws house, they sold the council house for £275,000 to a property developer.

Because so many areas are a mix of council and ex-council housing the Right to Buy has brought about a situation whereby young people may struggle to buy a house which had been sold by the council to a previous tenant years ago, now on the market at full value (but still needing renovation), yet in the same road another family may be allocated an extensively renovated refurbished council house which they may then purchase in the future for 50% of its value.

That scenario does seem totally unfair - and how does one family get allocated a council house when another family can be on the waiting list for years and be pushed further and further down the list?
And no, it is not due to 'immigrants' taking the housing in this area!

Gardenman I am no tax expert but were they liable for capital gains tax?

I have never understood the decision to let tenants buy their council houses thus depleting housing stock.

As I understand it, council house tenants have maintenance and repairs undertaken for them and decorations too. Please correct me if I am wrong but that's what I believe.

If these tenants are then allowed to sell an updated house for market rates it is unfair to the council-tax payees who have subsidised the repairs etc., and of course most of all, it removes the hose from stock needed for others.

I must make it difficult to do a complete replacement of the obsolete houses in a scheme if a proportion of them belong to individuals. All the dust of demolition and then all the building work, while people are coming and going to work and so on amid the mess.

As far as I can remember, Right to Buy was as much about buying votes as it was about property ownership.

In my neck of the woods (Labour, with a large social housing contingent) we managed to elect a Tory back in the early 80s for the first (and thankfully the last) time ever.

Thatcher has a lot to answer for, one way and another..

It does Eleothan - there's and estate I know of that is the classic little boxes made of ticky-tacky - terraces with flat roofs, built going on for 50 years ago to decant people out of London slums into the countryside (kinda). Must have looked lovely on the plans - lots of open space. Badly needs knocking down now and re-building to modern, energy efficient standards. Not a chance as so many have been bought. I see if I can find a link... Here you are. None for sale at the moment but one for rent.
www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-56270386.html

I see what you mean.

Elegran, where my sister lives her whole street, private and council and housing association, about 200 houses in terraces, was going to be bought up by the council.
All residents were going to be moved to different houses.
When the street had been modernised, the residents were going to be given the choice of moving back or staying where they were, either renting or buying.
It was part of inner city regeneration. Every other terrace was going to be knocked down and the remaining houses given a garden instead of a back yard.
The planning had taken five years, the finance was in place, much of it from EU grants. Then the Tory government got in and the scheme was stopped.
After another couple of years and taking the council to court for planning blight, as none of them could sell their houses, what actually happened was just as you said.
My sister had to put off having a hip replacement as she wouldn't have been able to get out of the house on even ground.

From the point of someone who has bought a council house, my reasons were that I felt I was achieving something, bettering myself and doing it without a mans help. I really thought it was a good idea at the time and for me it has been, Ive never defaulted and will never default on the payments and I'm not in debt.

The other point that was important to me was the hundreds of council houses nearby that was full of no hopers, gardens full of old cars, kids running wild at night, drugs etc. Once a proportion of council houses are sold the standards go up, now council estates are quite nice, well kept places to live, I personally know of a lawyer and an accountant who live in an ex council house.
If we have council houses just for the poor we will go back to the ghetto days as before when it was not safe to walk the streets at night, no one can want that. Also it is a stigma to say you are from a council estate and why should you have that.
Homes for council tenants should be mixed in with others just like on private estates where we have private rented homes and no one need know who owns and who buys, that is the only way forward.

I have in the past been taunted with names like 'council scum' etc, my own MIL said she would not visit me in a council house as I had brought her son down, I have been told that council girls are well recognized with their tattoos and hair dyes etc. In reality I am none of these, I work hard and never do anything to be a disgrace.
so I think there must be another answer to the homes needed to put the poor and sick, not council estates