If you asked a group of people to name one policy of Margaret Thatcher's government chances are that many would say right to buy. It is one of the most iconic and insidious policies of her eleven years in power, and its legacy still haunts us today.
Right to buy positioned the Tories as the party of housing aspiration. Yet the actual effects of the policy have left both home ownership and a secure social tenancy totally out of reach of the vast majority of people - those in what Ed Miliband has called the "squeezed middle". One of the biggest challenges for the next Labour government will be addressing this problem.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with allowing council tenants to buy their homes; the issue is the way in which it is done. Thatcher's right to buy was designed to transform Britain into a nation of homeowners whilst simultaneously transforming working class people into Tory voters. Yet the irony is that it became one of the biggest causes of the recent decline in home ownership.
The reasons for this are simple. Many tenants who bought their homes at a discount quite understandably decided to sell them, make a profit and move to bigger and better homes elsewhere. Vast swathes of former council properties were snapped up by private landlords in the buy to let boom at the beginning of the last decade. True-blue Tory Westminster saw half of its council properties sold under right to buy. Of those a third are now in the hands of private landlords.
Despite initial reassurances that each home sold would be replaced, the whole policy was deliberately constructed to prevent this from happening. Receipts from council house sales went to the Treasury rather than local authorities, which were prevented from building new homes.
It was hardly a surprise when a Tory housing minister in a Tory-led government announced that he was to reanimate the corpse of right to buy. Once again, reassurances have been given that each home sold will be replaced. Yet the devil is as always in the detail. Councils are only allowed to use around a third of the proceeds of each sale to build a new home. Those without land to leverage or who aren't willing or able to borrow the extra two-thirds will struggle to deliver replacement homes within the three-year time limit after which they lose the proceeds of the sale.
Labour must recognise three important facts. First, the desperate and ever growing need for more council housing. A number of Labour-run boroughs in London like Camden, Hackney, Islington and Southwark are taking a lead on this and have started to build new council homes for the first time in two decades. But councils are severely limited by the borrowing restrictions placed on them by the Treasury. The next Labour government must lift these restrictions, recognising that borrowing to invest does not increase the structural deficit, and will create not just new homes but much needed new jobs.
Second, the need for a reformed, fair right to buy policy. We cannot go back to blanket, ideological opposition to right to buy any more than we can allow the current model to continue. In a true spirit of localism councils must be given more power over what they choose to sell, when they sell it and how much they sell it for. We should also seriously look at giving councils an equity stake in every home sold, given that these are assets paid for and built at the taxpayers' expense. When the right-wing press talk about people on benefits being "given" council homes they deliberately try to obfuscate the fact that these homes are owned by all of us.
Third, at the very core of our housing policy must be Nye Bevan's vision of "the living tapestry of a mixed community." He dreamed of communities where "the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street." When the political children of Dame Shirley Porter decry council estates as "barracks for the poor" they suffer a convenient bout of amnesia. Before Thatcher came to power council estates reflected the national demographic. It was only when her government's policies ended council house building that council homes became rationed by ever growing need.
Labour can and should be the party of housing aspiration. That doesn't just mean those who aspire to own their own home, but those who aspire to a decent rented home with a secure tenancy. The last Labour government was terrified that there was an either/or trade-off: that you couldn't simultaneously be seen as the party of home ownership and of decent social rented accommodation. Any responsible Labour housing policy must recognise that you can be both.