Ever since the 80s Tory leaders have dreamed of creating a ‘property-owning democracy’. But selling off social housing has left millions of Britons in grotty privately rented accommodation
recently announced that right to buy will be extended to tenants of housing associations – not-for-profit organisations that let homes to about 2.5 million people at rents of up to 80% of the market rate. Millions of right-to-buyers have “switched identities and psychology”, Johnson claimed, from state dependence to proud self-reliance, echoing Thatcher’s fixation on “the independence that comes with ownership”.
But back in south London, where Salter had spent his childhood in poor-quality private rented housing, I met Danielle Nicole, a 32-year-old who graduated 11 years ago, still living with her mum in the terrace house she bought in 1990 using proceeds from right to buy.
Spratt heard a similar story, this time in Wythenshawe, a large garden city-style estate built on the edge of Manchester in the 1920s. She met Amy and Dan , a young couple with children living in an ex-council house owned by a bullying local builder-cum-landlord who, they said, was “absolutely wadded” from letting local properties. “Dan’s own family had benefited from right to buy,” says Spratt. His mother had bought her council house, which she still lived in.
From 1936, the minister of health could authorise councils to sell houses to individual tenants, a practice that stopped abruptly – though temporarily – when Labour was elected immediately after the war, putting Aneurin Bevan in charge of health and housing. Bevan imagined the building of excellent-quality council housing not only as essential to narrowing inequalities in public health, but as a way of forging a society where class mattered less.
“A lot of Labour advisers were very, very frustrated because they knew if they didn’t do it, the Tory party would walk in and do it,” the authortold me in 2017 on Streets Apart, a BBC radio series tracing the history of social housing. Covertly, said Beckett, “it appealed to [Thatcher’s] idea of the respectable working class”.
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