Housing strategy: plans for right-to-buy are a 'sleight of hand'

In Joe Haines' autobiography he talks about trying to persuade Labour leader Harold Wilson to begin developing what eventually became the right-to-buy. His response to Wilson's concerns about running down the council housing stock was to replace each sold home with a new one. Wilson still refused and allowed right-to-buy to become a Conservative policy, helping the party remain in power for a generation. Roll on 35 years and David Cameron is now commiting to what Joe Haines, and all successive governments, had failed to do: increasing discounts on sales through right-to-buy and building a new home for every one sold off. There is an interesting sleight of hand here. Currently there is virtually no right to buy; the effective reduction in the discount on sale price and the difficulty faced by a limited pool of working tenants in obtaining a mortgage means it has become a rarity. The difficult settlement on Housing Revenue Account reform (and there are still big problems for some councils) was made worse by the insistence that 75% of receipts had to go the Treasury, further undermining the ability of some councils to make the figures stack up. Yet this is all magicked away by saying that the first call on right-to-buy receipts will be outstanding debt, conveniently with no figures to clarify what this means. The next portion of income will meet forecast receipts for both local authority and Treasury – which means the Treasury still gets its share – and then the remaining amount will be used to fund affordable rents at £20K per property. Although housing associations can't be forced to do the same, the expectation is that the extra money will be used to fund the development of new homes. Hey presto, 100,000 new homes built and lots of happy right-to-buy tenants. I'm far from sure that all of this adds up; not for councils running the scheme, nor because of the presumptions it makes about housing associations, and certainly not for the tenants who find themselves out of work. The latter is the really big missed opportunity in the government's housing strategy. Last year, chancellor George Osbourne said social housing had failed and right wing thinktanks were happily lining up saying the sector was responsible for keeping tenants out of work. So where are the links between the jobs being created and unemployed tenants? Getting tenants trained, into work and able to afford a mortgage would do more than anything else to meet the Governments own objectives on development and home ownership. But this easy win appears to have become victim to the ongoing feud between different arms of government. Phil Morgan is a housing consultant and a member of the Guardian Housing Network editorial advisory panel This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the housing network for more comment and analysis direct to your inbox