"Local Space" - The buying back of Right to Buy properties

It was interesting to read the following article in the national Guardian yesterday:

http://society.guardian.co.uk/communities/story/
0,,1828487,00.html

The article says that thousands of council homes sold under the right to buy could be brought back into the social housing sector under a scheme designed to cut the escalating costs of housing homeless families. It will be interesting to see if this happens in Sutton?

Thats ironic, but just reflects various trends that have been emerging in recent years as instead of "right to buy" on our estates, we now see "buy to let" as former Council estates become the new pension scheme for those who have a few quid to invest. This can be done privately by individuals, but is now becoming a sensible idea for institutional investors investing in Housing Associations.

The Thatcherite assumption was that Right to Buy would transform estates full of well-off owners who would stay and improve improve the area. It clearly did benefit some people especially those living in houses who capitalised their savings or redundancy money and then naturally followed the market and moved on somewhere else. However it also led subsequently to much higher turnover or residents thus impacting on the community cohesion of less well off areas and creating a perception of decline, which groups like the BNP then seek to exploit.

For people living in flats who were enticed with even larger disounts, the jury is still out as the blocks did not have a "sinking fund" and thus later on leaseholders had suffered from very large bills.

The worst impact was that the money from right to buy was not invested in existng homes or building new homes - only got paying off long-term debt. This led to longer waiting lists and also increased house prices at the bottom of the market, ironically making home ownership more difficult locally, the exact opposite of what right to buy was meant to achieve!