Mark Prisk is Minister for Housing and MP for Hertford and Stortford. Follow Mark on Twitter.
If you look back over the last 30 years, of all the ways in which Conservatives have
helped people who want to get on in life, the Right to Buy stands out. Over two
million families have benefitted since Margaret Thatcher launched the policy
early in the 1980s.
However, under Labour the policy was strangled to death by John Prescott and by Labour councils who despised the idea that someone might want to move on and up. Without ever having the political courage to just scrap it, Labour put every possible obstacle in the way until, by the end of their 13 years in power, quarterly sales had dwindled to just a few hundred.
But, three years on, Right to Buy is staging a comeback. And its revival is being driven, in part, by a new grassroots-led campaign.
When I took on this job a year ago, quarterly sales were just starting to improve, but were still just over 400 per quarter. Grant Shapps had already raised the maximum discount to £75,000, and we quickly raised that to £100,000 in London, to reflect modern property prices. And, later this year, the Deregulation Bill will extend the right to those living in their council home for three years, just as back in the 1980s.
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