He is surely not speaking for the Coalition government – it so rarely seems to be the case that anybody is these days – but LibDem deputy leader Simon Hughes has opened up a new front, proposing the end of Margaret Thatcher’s flagship “right to buy” policy, to end a week which has suggested the Coalition parties have very different instincts when it comes to housing policy.

It looks a strong political scoop for the South London Press, whose interview with Hughes could well create some waves at Westminster.

The Hughes interview is not yet online, but the South London Press have splashed today’s weekend print edition on the interview with chief reporter Greg Truscott, under the front-page headline:

‘END RIGHT TO BUY’
MP’s radical solution to housing crisis

Hughes’ proposal is that localism could mean councils deciding that the right to buy was not right for their area, if facing acute shortages of housing stock.

The South London Press quotes Hughes saying this in the interview:

“The local housing authority should be free to say that they are not going to grant the Right to Buy, just as the Welsh have done.

I represent a constituency with more council tenants than anywhere else in England. We have lost thousands of homes and we can not afford to lose more.

Right to Buy was a Tory policy and I accept it would be difficult to agree a national policy. But the Conservatives are signed up, like us, to give more power to local councils and it could give them the right to say no to ‘right to buy’ when there is a desperate shortage of rented accomodation”.

Hughes is aware of the totemic status of ‘right to buy’ as a symbol of the Thatcher government. So his comments may well exacerbate existing arguments over several different housing policies, as Hughes repeats his concerns about the impact of the government’s proposed cuts in housing benefit.

The strength of Hughes’ concern over David Cameron’s tenure proposals surely reflects the importance of social housing in his own constituency. However, Downing Street suggest the measure could be legislated for as early as this Autumn with Nick Clegg’s support.

Conservatives are likely to want to defend right to buy from Hughes’ localist challenge.

Yet, perhaps ironically, David Cameron’s own proposals to remove security of tenure could well lead to the right to buy being lost or weakened, albeit by the back door.

Tenants need to have five years residency to be eligible, so if fixed term tenancies were of a shorter length, the right would be lost by those tenants. And part of the point of the Cameron approach is for council housing to be still more focused on those in greatest need.

If the result was to residualise council housing further predominantly among those out-of-work, then the right to buy will be rather more hypothetical anyway if fewer social housing tenants could afford to exercise it.

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

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3. Mikey Smith

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5. Thereminwar

   RT @libcon: End right to buy – says Simon Hughes http://bit.ly/bc1IrR <- Nice try Hughesie but Dave & The Gang will never go for that…

6. fljf

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7. overhere

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11. Dave Howard

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12. Liberal Vision » Blog Archive » Simon Hughes is wrong on right to buy

    [...] for making up housing policy on the hoof without consulting coalition channels, Simon Hughes is campaigning for an option for Councils to suspend the Right to Buy scheme. This would be a bad [...]