Selling off council homes

riverwalk I agree that "part-ownership" is fraught with pitfalls.

anya I've learnt (especially on this forum) to be careful and preface statements with "some", "many", "may" etc . So I don't know is the short answer, what I wrote is anecdotal from my own observations and from what I see advertised in our local estate agents and from what people on our estate tell me and there are many examples of that locally.

jingle I disagree that people must remain living in a dump whilst the rest of the world moves on around them. If people are strapped for cash, it doesn't cost much to beautify a place e.g. by planting up a front flower bed (we all share plants on our estate) and there is a constant stream of offers of free paint left over from redecorating on freecycle. If I had any spare money over a period of twenty, thirty or even forty years, I'd be making my own space more comfortable and nicer to live in. A little bit of beautification at a time would do it.

'Affordable' homes are usually Part-Ownership ..... a young couple I know are about to buy a 25% share of a very small flat.

That's 25% of a £400,000 property and they will be paying rent on the other 75%. IMO it's very unlikely that they'll ever be able to buy the remainder as wage increases will never match increasing property prices.

A 25% share will go up in value also but that could be difficult to sell in future if they wanted to realise the increase and try and move somewhere else.

A young colleague bought something similar and a few years later had to sell as she found the mortgage, rent, and ever-increasing service charge unmanageable.

Home ownership ie owning a little bit of your country was supposed to make you feel more responsible for your country. Or something. (Surely you get the gist )

Like I say, that's not what social housing should be about.

I think she said "society".

How was the original idea to make people feel more involved in their communities?
Thatcher said there was no such thing as community.

They may be bungalows available to rent but these were built for the elderly not young couples or singles. The government is now making it possible for housing associations to sell off their social houses and are building houses which they claim will be affordable to buy.

Young people on low wages cannot afford private rentals, have no chance of social housing so even marriage is now for the more affluent only.

Couples on low wages really should abstain from sex after having two children because no matter what is claimed and has been on this forum , contraception is not a 100% guarantee .

People on low pay or unable to work are dismissed as lazy benefit cheats , those who defend them are dismissed as lefties or mocked on having compassion for the vulnerable.

There are serious problems in the mental health services whilst suicide rates are rising. The answer to severe depression is get a job , working for the minimum wage, contract hours, no chance of a home is a sure way to ease depression isn't it.

It shouldn't be about re-vamping the properties, taking out walls, making them modern straight-out-of-Homes-and-Garden-mag. It should be about giving people who will never be able to buy, a dry, well insulated, decent roof over their heads.

The original idea behind right to buy was to make people feel more 'involved' and, therefore, more responsible for their own communities. It hasn't worked, and anyway, there is more to housing people than that.

I think the biggest injustice for tax-payers is that councils are increasingly having to rent former council properties, at London market rates, to house families on the waiting list.

We bought an ex police house in 1985, we re vamped the kitchen and bathroom installed central heating and double glazing within the first 5 yrs. We have re done the kitchen and bathroom recently.
My brother moved back into our family council house after his divorce. He bought it in mums name to obtain the substantial discount. The council had installed central heating and double glazing before he bought it. Mum died two years ago and he's now doing major building works in order to sell it. The road is 95% privately owned now.

I ask because our house was an ex-council house and the previous owner hadn't done much to improve it either. But then I'm thinking this move to improve really grew in the 90s with all the TV programmes that came out about house renovations and improvements.

Until then, people were (by and large and in general) quite content to slap on new paint or re-paper and think that was it. Upgrading heating systems waited until the boiler failed, and replacing a whole house with new Windows didn't happen much, and knocking walls down to extent rooms was looked upon as very new and trendy.

Nowadays people are far more inclined to do all this as a matter of course, don't you think?

How many is 'some'?

It is apparent to me that some people who bought their Council houses subsequently made huge profits on selling, especially in parts of London.

I also observe (on the estate where I live) that some of the people who purchased their Council properties have done nothing to improve them in 30 years, which I find absolutely amazing. They still have the original kitchens, cramped layouts, and extremely dated heating systems. I can never work out why they bought the houses (and still live in them) but haven't spent any money on them, but I guess that's human nature for you. By contrast, in the two flats around the corner from me where there is a high turnover of new Council tenants (always young mums with babies) - the flats have been revamped more times than I remember. Funny old world.

We bought a former Council house and have completely revamped it, including taking out walls and putting new ones in, relaying the patio and reclaiming an overgrown area of the garden outside our front gate. Other owners around me have done similar (as Anya says) - these "new" owners are Polish, Ghanaian(sp?), South African, British, and Korean.

It's far more than 'some council tenants' who have benefitted. In our own there was obviously a huge drive to build council houses in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost whole former estates were then bought privately under the 'right to buy scheme' with just the odd house staying in council ownership.

The areas have really developed beautifully since then, with properties being done up by the former tenants. It is very easy to see which houses are not now privately owned but still in council hands.

Property companies are not buying the flats from owners but are enticing current council tenants with a scheme which lends them the money to buy but the ultimate owner is the company; the tenant is then paid-off (don't know how much) and the company then has a property in a prime central London area at a fraction of the price.

Many of the tenants are on Housing Benefit when they buy - how they explain where the money came from I don't know. Presumably these schemes are legal.

Also, what happens to the tenants - probably back onto the housing waiting list?

Whilst some council tenants have benefited from the right to buy scheme, it has been at the expense of those people who desperately need social housing. Also, nearly one-third of council homes are now owned by private landlords and in one London borough almost 50% of ex-council properties are now sub-let to tenants, often at extortionate rates.

Those with money, such as the son of Ian Gow, the Housing Minister appointed by Mrs Thatcher, have benefited more than most. He was reported in 2013 to own at least 40 ex-council flats and for many other landlords the buy-to-let market has proved extremely lucrative. Despite the high rents now demanded, many landlords - although, of course, not all - are very reluctant to spend money on properly maintaining their properties and, at the end of lease periods, simply evict tenants who ask for essential repairs to be carried out.

Labour first of all reduced the discounts that tenants were given in order to discourage them from buying. Then the owners had to give the council first refusal on buying them back if they wanted to sell.
Is that doing nothing?

In my part of London lots of tenants bought their council houses.Once they had bought them they spent time and money doing them up.
It was a really lovely area to live in.
Than the whole area went through a lot of redevelopment and house prices went up so a lot of the owner tenant sold up and moved to Essex.
The ex council houses are now owned by buy to let people.
The once smart ex council houses now look a mess they are not looked after.

I can't agree that the 'right to buy' was ever a good idea. We need social housing for those who will never be able to afford to buy their own house.

There should be enough affordable housing available for council tenants who want to get on the property owning ladder.

Yet Labour did nothing to counteract that in all their subsequent years in government. Why not?

1980 housing act.
"Half the proceeds of the sales were paid to the local authorities, but they were restricted to spending the money to reduce their debt until it was cleared, rather than being able to spend it on building more homes. The effect was to reduce the council housing stock, especially in areas where property prices were high such as London and the south-east of England. This trend was exacerbated by a government imposed ban on local authorities using their revenues from council house sales to fund new housing.[8] Both these policies, together with rising rents and cuts to state benefits, have been linked to vast increase in homelessness, when rough sleepers became an increasingly common sight. Homeless households in England during the 1980s, trebled from approximately 55,000 (1980) to 165,000 in 1990.[9]

200,000 council houses were sold to their tenants in 1982, and by 1987, more than 1,000,000 council houses in Britain had been sold to their tenants, although the number of council houses purchased by tenants declined during the 1990s.[10]"

So did local authorities take the decision not to spend the income from sold off Council houses on building new (Council) houses? Did they allocate the money to something else? And did all local authorities do that? Where did that money go?

deedaa how discouraging for your son.

Right to buy was fine, but I could never understand why the money wasn't used to build more houses. DS is currently 400th on the council list and that hasn't changed since January.

I agree with anya that the money should be used for new building and also their should be the option for buyers to sell back like for like to the council if they cant manage to afford their homes. I worry that I will not be able to afford my house as I get older. If we had this option we would have a certain amount of houses returned to the local authorities. I see many run down ex council houses on my travels.

Another problem was and is the amount of discount people got for buying the house. The cost of building went up and the money the councils got went down, so there would have been a gap in building like for like even if the councils had been given the money.

That was the "dreadful thing", not the right to buy but the assumption that there would then be no need to build any more council houses.

If the money from selling them (at the cost of rebuilding but without making a profit) had been put straight back into more housing, there would have been a continuous feed-in of new houses to replace the old stock. LAs could have built whatever size there was a need for, to modern specifications.