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4 hours ago
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Perhaps only England could make its politician of the moment a woman who died more than a decade ago. Yet turn on Channel 4 and watch Margaret Thatcher: the drama. Radio 4 offers Margaret Thatcher: the play, while soon you can enjoy Thatcher: the opera. For those who can’t wait, there’s Thatcher: the news story, as the British media celebrates 50 years this week since she was crowned Tory leader.
Such pieces are reliably more fascinated by how she looked (Shoulder pads! Handbag! Blond halo!) than what she did. So let me tell you a story about one of Thatcher’s deeds that shapes how we live today. Rather than some dusty tale dug out of the archive, it’s unfolding right now. And you won’t have seen it in any other newspaper.
At its heart is that flagship of Thatcherism: the right to buy. Her single biggest privatisation, it allowed tenants of homes built and owned by the public to buy them at a bargain price. Launched in 1980, the policy remains in force today – although its heyday was thought to be long past. Until, that is, Keir Starmer became prime minister.
Among the first acts of Starmer’s government was to slash the discount available to council tenants wanting to buy their homes. In London, the cut is especially sharp: before the deadline of 21 November 2024, the markdown could be as much as £136,400; now it is £16,000. It’s a good move, squeezing demand and all but choking Thatcher’s policy to death. It’s also a dramatic move – but just how dramatic is not public. To find out, I sent freedom of information requests to every London council.
You may think you know what’s coming next. Perhaps you figure that, as the deadline loomed, there was a stream of interest. Wrong: there was no stream; there was a deluge.
Of the 32 London boroughs, 27 responded. After analysing their results, I can reveal:
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Brent saw a more than 7,000% rise in right-to-buy (RTB) applications in November over the month before; in Lambeth and Camden, it was more than 2,000%, for Southwark, 1,500%.
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November’s flood of applications means Lewisham is dealing with more bids this financial year than it received in the previous four years put together, while Hackney is managing the equivalent of more than three years’ worth of would-be buyers.
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Islington got 922 RTB applications in November alone, where it would normally expect closer to 200 over an entire year.
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With months still left of this financial year, London authorities have together already received 3.5 times the RTB applications they got last year.
Whether north or south of the river, inner city or outer suburb, the pattern is unmistakable and stark. Battered by years of cuts, besieged by the spending pressures local authorities now face, as I heard on phone call after phone call, there has been “an explosion” in applications; a “staggering” number of bids; “unprecedented” demand. Just look at this chart, and the map, showing right-to-buy applications over the course of this year. They basically flatline until November – then they rocket.
At London’s largest council landlord, Southwark, where more than 1,300 bids flooded in over the first three weeks of November, they’re drafting in extra staff to handle the fraud checks and other formalities, so the team can swell to twice its usual size. Despite that and the legal deadlines, they told me they estimate it will take more than 19 weeks simply to get through the first stages.
What these boroughs are describing is low-level chaos, and it is by no means confined to London. In other big cities, councils are facing the same thing: a blizzard of paperwork too large for staff to handle, a good proportion of dodgy or flawed bids, and no certainty at all about how many council homes are flogged off at the end of it all. Take as an example Lewisham where, over the past couple of years, about half of all RTB applications have resulted in sales. Apply that same ratio to bids received last November alone, and at a stroke the borough will lose almost as many council homes as the total it has built since 2020.
Call it Thatcher’s hangover: the good times, if that’s what they were, wore off long ago and now all that’s left is a dusty thudding in the head and costs that never stop rising. Her most famous policy, right to buy, shows how the hangover never stops. Public money was spent on building those homes; public money was lost through giving them away cheap; and public money is now funnelled in housing benefit to the landlords who let them out.
Last November’s gold rush exposes how cynical those homilies about a property-owning democracy always were. Property owning? For some, but for others try: property flipping, property renting, property accumulating – done on the cheap with taxpayers’ cash. While the private sector keeps raking it in, the public sector is deprived of rental income and forced into ever more desperate measures to house tenants. In my own London borough of Enfield, families with nowhere else to live are now shipped off to ex-mining villages in County Durham.
At Southwark, they reckon they’ve lost 16,000 homes over the decades through right to buy. About half of those are now rented out privately to tenants who might otherwise have got them from the council, with cheaper rents and more secure contracts. “By depriving councils of homes, right to buy takes away the security that allows kids to finish school or their parents to keep their jobs,” says Southwark council’s leader, Kieron Williams. “The rise in homelessness is more or less a direct result of right to buy.”
Starmerism is a small and ever-shrinking puddle of ideas, but it retains an emphasis on building stuff: infrastructure, homes, new towns. Ministers talk big numbers about housebuilding, yet they refuse to set targets on council housebuilding. Starmer focuses on housing supply, about which the far more politically savvy Thatcher didn’t give a monkey’s. She cared only about demand – demand from her people, her voters, who in turn rewarded her with three election victories. Without the aid of a focus group, Starmer’s team barely know who their people are. They won’t come out and argue for more council homes. At best, they’ll do the right thing, but by stealth, in the small print, where they’ll hope GB News never finds it.
But you need more than this comedy of errors – shoving a terrible policy off-stage, sparking yet another huge selloff in the process and inducing another drop in council housing. You really need an alternative. At Wandsworth council, Aydin Dikerdem is the cabinet lead for housing. While not opposing right to buy, he talks about the need to build council homes, to expand notions of what the public realm can provide.
“My mum and dad lived on a council estate, and my mum was a teacher. Today that would be totally utopian,” he says. “But it wasn’t a generation ago. Within a generation, we’ve lost a sense of public assets and public housing. But that means we can also get it back in a generation.”
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Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
