Plea to extend right to buy to 1m more tenants
Monday, 9 January 2012 11:11 AM
Conservative MP David Davis has teamed up with Labour MP Frank Field to call for an extension of the right to buy for housing association tenants.
In a cross-party report for the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank, they argue that the housing crisis demands a radical policy that will ease the pressure on social housing and at the same time help tenants who want to become homeowners.
Council tenants and some housing association tenants already have the right to buy their home but legislation excludes about one million housing association tenants.
Field and Davis argue in Right to Buy 2.0 that all of the receipts raised should be recycled into new social housing to cut waiting lists.
They want the government to extend its current consultation on increasing the discounts for the existing right to buy to include the extension and model the effects.
Field and Davis say in their report: "Preventing social tenants from owning their home ties up billions of pounds of public funds that could be better used to help people onto the housing ladder.
"Reinvigorating and extending the right to buy would not only increase home ownership: by using all the funds raised to build new homes, the policy would lift the most vulnerable households in Britain off waiting lists, out of temporary accommodation and into a place they can call home."
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