Introduction

From when the 20 estates were first built until 1981, all homes in all 20 were owned and managed by local authorities. From 1981, successive governments created a range of methods to change the ownership and management of council housing, including the Right to Buy, stock transfer and estate redevelopment (Chapters 7 and 13), some of which were particularly targeted at less popular estates. This chapter describes the impact of these mechanisms in the 20 estates.

The impact of the Right to Buy

The Right to Buy, introduced in 1981, gave tenants of councils and non-charitable housing associations with at least three years tenancy the right to buy their homes at a substantial discount, depending on the length of their tenancy. It is the best-known of all housing policies in the UK and is also well known abroad. Annual Right to Buy and other sales peaked at 167,000 in 1982/83, and by 2009/10 they had fallen to 6,000 per year (Stephens et al 2019). Between 1980/81 and 2017/18, 1.9 million council homes and 0.1 million housing association homes were bought in England (MHCLG 2019a). By 2017/18, 6 per cent of all households in England lived in homes that were originally built and owned by social landlords, but had changed tenure through the Right to Buy. Sales reduced as the most attractive homes were bought and discounts fell behind prices (Murie 2016).

The Right to Buy took a long time to have a direct effect on the 20 estates. By 1995, 15 years into the policy, an average of only 5 per cent of homes had been bought, and only 3 per cent in the mixed and deck-access estates. This compared to an average for the estate local authorities of 19 per cent, and a national average of 26 per cent. The manager at E7 (1970/1,100/deck/L) described the early purchases at his estate as “very strange”. Purchase is a sign of at least minimum confidence, indicating that buyers were willing to stay in the home for at least five years (to avoid having to repay the discount on moving), and that homes were accepted by lenders as security.