Boris Johnson is hoping to sprinkle some of Margaret Thatcher’s radicalism on his exhausted government by introducing a right to buy for housing association tenants.
Northern Ireland is heading in the opposite direction. Such tenants here have had a right to buy for decades, on the same terms as Housing Executive tenants, but this will be abolished at the end of August.
Abolition is due to a cross-party policy at Stormont to give housing associations private borrowing powers.
Keeping private loans off the public books means the right to buy has to go, according to public sector accounting rules.
The classic criticism of Thatcher’s scheme was that councils were not allowed to keep the revenue and spend it on replacement dwellings.
That does not apply to Northern Ireland’s housing associations: they must reinvest sale revenue, which has averaged £20 million a year, in new housing. The hope is private borrowing will dwarf that figure and fund a building boom.
Maybe it will, and the borrowing plan has been a solid if slow example of delivery by the executive. However, in terms of political impact it has failed the Thatcher test. How many people are even aware of it, let alone experiencing 1980s levels of excitement or outrage?
Only five per cent of households in Northern Ireland are housing association tenants. To cause a political and social earthquake through housing today, the target has to be the private rental sector, not just because it has three times as many tenants but because it has so many landlords that they are themselves an economic force and electoral constituency.
Whenever a right to buy for private tenants is suggested, the first outraged complaint is of far-left wealth confiscation. Labour adopted the policy under Jeremy Corbyn, as if to prove it. Yet Labour won the immediate backing of centre-right think tank Civitas, one of many serious proponents of this policy from the right.
Landlordism is not necessarily capitalism and can often be its opposite. Unless landlords invest in construction they are merely acquiring the existing stock of housing, bidding up its price and turning us back into a pre-industrial society of the propertied and unpropertied classes.
Labour dropped the private right to buy from its manifesto two months before the 2019 general election.
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said: “There’s a large number of individuals or families who have bought another property as their asset for the future and we wouldn’t want to endanger that.”
Unlike Thatcher, he and Corbyn lacked the courage of their convictions.
Civitas proposed that private tenancies should be guaranteed for five years with the right to buy commencing at three. A less assertive ‘option to buy’ was suggested in 2018 by the Conservative Party-linked group Onward. If a landlord chose to sell to a tenant, the government would only charge the landlord half the usual tax on the sale and would give the other half to the tenant as a deposit. The author of Onward’s report had been Downing Street’s deputy head of policy under Theresa May. Private right to buy could have been in both Tory and Labour manifestos in 2019.
Infinite variations on the idea are possible. To ensure private rental property remains available and adds to the housing stock, build-to-rent developments such as those recently approved in Titanic Quarter could be exempted, or exempted for 20 years, by which point most investors aim to recoup their money.
Tenants could be helped to buy through a subsidised discount, or via co-ownership, or through some new form of affordable mortgage - a ‘student loan’ for housing.
A challenging question is whether housing benefit should continue for claimants buying their home. Benefits stop for social housing tenants and this has always been seen, if rarely declared, to have moral and popular dimensions. People do not want to be working to buy their home while their neighbours are simply given one.
But private tenancies are different. The taxpayer is buying a house for the landlord; buying it for the tenant instead would advance Thatcher’s goal of spreading property ownership.
Housing is devolved and Stormont can set benefit rules, as long as it funds any difference from Britain.
Radical intervention in the private rental market is likely to be a generation-defining policy across the UK and Ireland. It is on its way, already transcends left and right and will transcend green and orange as the housing crisis arrives fully on our shores.
We may hope for an executive that transcends its limitations.
