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Daily Record
Daily Record
Politics
Chris McCall

SNP rejects Right to Buy scheme in Scotland as Boris Johnson plans extension in England

The Scottish Government has flatly rejected any prospect of reviving the controversial Right to Buy policy which allowed council tenants to purchase their homes.

Housing secretary Shona Robison told the Record that almost half a million properties had been lost to the social rented sector in Scotland as a result of the "unsustainable" scheme.

It comes as Boris Johnson today announced an extension of Right to Buy in England which will see tenants being handed the power to buy properties from housing associations.

The PM argued that £30 billion in housing benefit that currently goes towards rent could help people secure and pay for mortgages.

The policy was first introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s and saw thousands of council tenants able to get on the housing ladder at discount rates.

The Tories sold thousands of ex-council homes under Margaret Thatcher's government (Mirrorpix)

But it has been widely blamed for creating a massive shortage of affordable homes - particularly in London and the south east.

Many former council homes - built for and maintained by the taxpayer - are now in the control of private landlords.

The SNP vowed to scrap Right to Buy and the policy officially ended in Scotland in 2014.

Robison said: "The Scottish Government has no plans to reintroduce the Right to Buy, an unsustainable policy that took almost half a million homes out of the social rented sector and into private ownership.

"In the first ten years since the policy ended, we estimate that we will have kept up to 15,500 homes in the social rented sector – homes which will continue to be available to future generations at affordable rents.

"What’s more, in the four years to 2021 we delivered over nine times more social rented homes per head of population than England, and our per capita spending on affordable housing is more than three times higher than the UK Government’s.

"We want to ensure everyone has a warm, affordable home that meets their needs, and that is why we have committed to delivering a further 110,000 affordable homes by 2032, with at least 70% of these available for social rent."

Between the years 1979-80 and 2014-15 a total of 494,580 council and housing association homes were sold under Right to Buy in Scotland.

Housing policy expert Toby Lloyd earlier said the UK Government’s extension of the right-to-buy scheme was unlikely to have much impact for the low-earning people it intends to benefit.

Lloyd, who was former prime minister Theresa May’s housing adviser, told the BBC: "Clearly there are imperfections in the way that the mortgage market works at the moment, but fundamentally the problem is that house prices are way too high.

"That’s why there’s an affordability crisis."

When asked whether the Government’s new housing plan would have much effect, he said: "I’d be very surprised if it happens in anything like the scale they expect, and if it does I don’t expect it to have that much impact."

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