The prime minister, Theresa May, has claimed that the government has met a promise to replace properties sold through the right-to-buy scheme on a one-to-one basis.

Her claim was made in response to a question from the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who suggested that only one home was being built for every five sold through the scheme.

Right to buy was started by the Conservative government in the early 1980s and allowed tenants in council-owned properties to purchase their home at a discount to the market value. Since then, about 2m properties have moved into the private sector, and the proportion of homes in England that are social housing has fallen from 31% to 17%.

In 2012, David Cameron relaunched the scheme, increasing the discounts available to tenants. In London tenants now get discounts of up to £103,900, while those outside the capital can buy at up to £77,900 below market price. At the same time the government pledged to replace all homes sold under the new policy.

Since the relaunch, sales have picked up again. Between April 2012 and the end of 2015, there were 49,573 right-to-buy sales.

Have those homes been replaced?

No. Over that same period 4,594 new homes were started on site or acquired by councils. So just one in 10 of the sold-off properties were replaced.

Focusing just on the additional homes sold as a result of the reinvigorated policy makes the picture look slightly better for the government – and May could have been talking about that. But even then, all the extra homes sold have not been replaced or even started.



The government says that in the first year of the new policy there were 3,054 additional sales out of the total of 5,944. At the same time there were 473 housing starts and acquisitions in England.

However, councils are given three years to start replacements. They do not even have to start on the foundations for properties sold last year, meaning it is near impossible to work out if the promise is being met.

In its most recent release on right-to-buy sales, the Department for Communities and Local Government said: “Under the right-to-buy one-for-one additions policy, local authorities have three years from the date of the sale of each additional home to provide an additional affordable property.

“There were 3,054 additional sales between 2012-13 Q1 and 2012-13 Q4. There have been 5,239 starts and acquisitions delivered by local authorities between 2012-13 Q1 and 2015- 16 Q4, exceeding the target for one-for-one additions.”

Added to these are 1,287 starts by other agencies, which gives 6,526 in total the department added.

But that means counting three years’ of building against one year of losses.

Building has picked up, but does not seem on track to meet the increase in sales since the discounts were added. In a paper published this year, the National Audit Office found that starts on new homes will have to rise five-fold by the end of 2017/18 for the 8,512 homes sold off in 2014/15 to be replaced.

That seems unlikely: analysis recently published by the Local Government Association showed that the replacement trend was downwards – building by councils had fallen by more than a quarter in the last financial year.

So the homes sold have not yet been replaced, and there are warnings that they will not be.