Britain's Labour government is moving to bar tenants from buying newly built council homes in England, rolling back a Margaret Thatcher-era scheme that has sold more than two million homes since 1980.
The change is part of a bill now moving through Parliament. Existing tenants would keep their right to purchase, but the option would not apply to new homes, a pledge Prime Minister Andy Burnham made at Labour's conference in September.
Burnham argues the move will keep council housing in public hands for generations. He has likened tackling the housing shortage while still selling off social homes to running a bath without the plug in.
Government figures put the stakes in numbers. Before Labour's restrictions, England was on course to lose a net 26,000 council homes over the next decade; ministers now project a net gain of 18,000.
The scheme has already been weakened significantly since Labour took power in 2024. Under Keir Starmer, the government sharply cut the maximum discount councils could offer tenants. The Conservatives and Reform UK say they would keep or even expand the program.
Wealth for buyers
About 40% of England's council housing has been sold under the program, most of it in the early years, according to housing researcher Rebecca Tunstall.
Lord Heseltine, the cabinet minister in charge of housing when the policy launched, said he would not have designed it differently and that buyers reaped large capital gains. He called the claim that former council homes are now rented back to the state at higher cost rubbish, saying the scheme spread ownership nationwide.
Barbara Stevens, 80, paid around £35,000 for her two-bedroom council flat in Kentish Town, north London. She now owns it outright and estimates it could fetch £600,000 to £700,000.
Research co-authored by Matteo Sandi, an economist at the University of Milan, found that children raised in areas with the heaviest uptake later did better at school, were likelier to attend university and earned more as adults. Even so, he said more social housing should have been built.
My take is the Right to Buy scheme was a good policy with a big limitation
Matteo Sandi, economics professor, University of Milan
Where the homes went
Critics say too few of the sold homes were replaced. Research by Molly Harris's think tank, the New Economics Foundation, found that 41% of homes sold under the scheme are now let by private landlords, and that the government spent more than £58bn from 2021 to 2025 subsidizing those landlords through the benefits system.
In Newham, the council says almost half of the 9,000 homes it sold were later flipped into private rentals. The east London borough now has the longest council house waiting list in the country.
Tunstall said the policy partly explains why social housing grew scarcer, pushing more people into private rentals and driving up rents. Heseltine acknowledged that the original expectation that councils would reinvest sale proceeds in new housing was not met after he left government.
A family-sized home in London now takes an average of 27 years to come up, and councils across England spend £8m a day housing families in temporary accommodation.
Ending sales may take years to pay off. Scotland scrapped its version in 2016 and Wales in 2019, yet Tunstall said neither has seen a big difference so far. She also blamed estate demolitions since the 1990s and decades of under-building for the shortage.
