Right to Buy (Hansard, 20 October 1993)

§ 7. Mr. Harry Greenway
To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment what plans he has to seek to extend the right to buy their homes to tenants of all housing associations; and if he will make a statement.

§ Sir George Young
The Government have no plans to extend the statutory right to buy, which is enjoyed by secure tenants of non-charitable housing associations, to tenants of charitable associations and to assured tenants. All associations are able to sell homes to their tenants on a voluntary basis, and we have encouraged them to apply the proceeds of such sales towards the provision of new social housing. The Government also provide grants to enable housing association tenants to buy into forms of shared ownership with a housing association or into outright ownership in the private market.

§ Mr. Greenway
Is my right hon. Friend aware that in Northolt, tenants of the Kittiwake road housing associations' development will have no right to buy? Local people have been required, through an unwilling Ealing council, to contribute £300,000 towards the land given to the housing associations for the development scheme. At the Perivale hospital site, 133 homes are being built by the housing associations which will not involve any right to buy or shared ownership. Does that not mean that housing association tenants, in cases where there is no right to buy, are second-class citizens compared to council tenants? Is it not time that this situation was ended?

§ Sir George Young
As my hon. Friend may know, the Government proposed legislation in the 1980s to extend the right to buy to tenants of charitable housing associations. Those proposals were twice rejected in another place. To bring home ownership within the reach of housing association tenants, we have developed alternative schemes, including the tenants' incentive scheme and the do-it-yourself shared ownership scheme, so that housing association tenants do have the opportunity of becoming home owners.

§ Mr. George Howarth
I welcome the Minister's lack of agreement with his hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway).The attention that the Government continue to lavish on owner occupation at the expense of rented housing is unworthy of the Minister. Would it not be better if he spent some time looking at positive alternatives to the irrelevant rent-to-mortgage scheme? It is about time that the Minister—who came to his job with something of a reputation—stopped scapegoating single-parent families and did something constructive about housing instead of continuing the present destructive policies.

§ Sir George Young
On the first point, we are devoting substantial resources to providing more affordable homes for rent, as the hon. Gentleman knows. The figure is about 60,000 for the current year, three times more than it was two or three years ago. We are investing substantial sums to provide homes for rent. As to the second point, before the hon. Gentleman mines that quarry much further, he should read The Independent of Wednesday 7 July, which said: 267 Labour slants homes policy against the single parent".

§ Mr. Duncan Smith
Does my right hon. Friend accept —in line with what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway)—that we have a problem with the housing associations? In areas such as mine—Waltham Forest, whose socialist-controlled council has been very dilatory in selling council homes to council tenants—housing associations are now buying up more land, locking more people into social housing and not giving them the opportunity to take up the right to buy, of which all Conservative Members are justifiably proud. May I urge my right hon. Friend to look again at the possibility of breaking down the position in regard to housing associations, so that we may change it radically?

§ Sir George Young
I am very interested in what my hon. Friend has said. A growing proportion of the Housing Corporation's budget is being spent on schemes that promote home ownership rather than renting. Shared-ownership incentive schemes, for example, now account for a larger percentage of the budget.
I am anxious for the housing association movement to be directed back towards its roots—towards urban regeneration, modernisation and improvement for sale, rather than towards extensive new building schemes for green-field sites. I said in Blackpool that I intended to bring about that redirection, which would be welcomed by many in the housing association movement.