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Disasterous Decsision?

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ToraToraTora | 12:15 Wed 03rd Jul 2013 | News
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-23155904
Ok we know the Scots were never much of a fan of the Iron Lady but surely this is a retrograde step.
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perhaps some is not fit for purpose...
they were selling social housing some time before Mrs T came to power.
A good decision, IMO.

Right to buy was a disastrous policy, selling off taxpayer funded homes on the cheap and not replacing the diminished social housing stock. It remains in my opinion one of the more egregious attempts at electoral bribery of all time...
it was being done before Mrs T, helloooo.
Well said, LazyGun!
and they are still doing it, our Labour council does...
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They have always been able to sell off council houses. MrsT merely introduced the right to buy.
the tories seemed to get blamed for a few policies that either werent their idea or other parties have run with rather than scrap.
My friend`s mother bought her council flat in Central London years ago for £30,000. It`s now worth at least £400,000. She`s elderly and not in good health and when she dies, the flat will be sold and the money will go into my (quite well off) friend`s pocket. That doesn`t seem right somehow. That flat was bought by the rate payers in the borough and I sometimes think that a proportion of it should go back to the council.
@Em. Yes, I am aware that councils have always had the right to sell off council homes. Thatchers introduction of the right to buy scheme massively accelerated that programme, offering huge discounts on publically owned properties, whilst at the same time restricting councils from using monies raised through the programme to build replacement social housing.

We are still seeing the effects of that policy now with the shortage of homes, the ridiculously high rental prices that private landords can extort, its contribution to fuelling the runaway house pricing bubble.

Much the same as selling off publically owned infrastructure at knock down prices too, creating a false market in public utilities, like water, for instance..
The right to buy should remain.

But anyone wanting to take a house out of public ownership should have to pay double the Market value because they are depriving future low paid people of a home.

The money from the sale should be ringfenced for future public home building.

Never saw any justification for these houses being sold below Market value.
the thing is no one would have thought that in a short time property prices would shoot through the roof, so that 30 grand that now translates to 400k is daylight robbery in effect. you can buy little here now that doesn't come with that price tag. and by the way, many council tenants are being asked, told or whatever to move, if they have one extra room, or two, and struggle to pay, because the bedroom tax affects them solely, for the moment.
free up space, and go where i wonder,
if we hadn't had so many people dumped into the capital, there might be adequate properties to go round, now that rents are so high, not many on low, middle incomes can afford it.
Amusingly, AB is displaying an advert for a shed dwelling accomanying this question.
no ads for me...
Right to buy was a good idea. There are countless 'council estates' around the country that are no longer soley coucil owned and are the better for it. People take a pride in their property and customize it meaning not everyone is living in a cloned property. (Although the communists on this site would love that- for every one but themselves of course)

What was wrong with it is that the money was not spent on new properties. In some cases I understand that the properties were significantly below market value but this was in the main due to rents paid offsetting it.

Just out of interest, to those touting the idea that it was a disastrous idea: Do you own your own property and are you tax payers?


For the record, I do and I am.
Sorry Tora

To answer your question; yes, it is a disastrous decision
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237Sj, so there are examples of legacies where people have benefitted from their forbares taking up the offer. Can't have that can we! Hundreds of council ghetto's where transformed by the RTB. That's what the lefties can't stand, they want everyone to be poor to have nothing to aspire to socialism.

When you buy your house you have more pride more interest more endeavour to keep it. I remember the early days of the eighties growing up on a council estate. The scum were stopped it seemed almost overnight, they cared about their new homes they cared about the area the bus stop, the paper shop, the paint on the lamp posts, they bought new doors, fences turned a living hutch into a home. That's what the closet commies cannot stand, they wanted us queing for a loaf. MrsT alone did that, that's why the gromits and co of this world hated her because she showed us that you don't have to stay poor just because you started poor.
perhaps they should have done that to the Heygate estate here in the capital, though i suspect there wouldn't have been many offers, the worse kind of Stalinist brutalism i have ever seen.
The point that the right-w(h)ingers on AnswerBank invariably fail to grasp about Thatcher's "right-to-buy" idiocy is that the council properties were not only to be sold at knock-down prices but that any money councils gained thereby was specifically FORBIDDEN to be used to build new such properties.
THAT is why so many young people nowadays haven't a hope in hell of getting onto the property ladder and why we are now subsidising the astronomical rents landlords get through housing benefit subsidies.

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