Phil Tate (Letters, 30 October) calls for the ramping up of the supply of social housing to reduce the housing benefit bill. Housing benefit represents a constant leakage of public finances into the pockets of private landlords, and the UK carries approximately double the burden of the EU average as a proportion of GDP. Such an appeal is doomed to failure unless there is a cessation of right to buy, which, as Andy Burnham has neatly put it, presents local authorities with an impossible task comparable with trying to fill a bath without a plug.
An illustration of this no-win situation is the social-housing development Goldsmith Street, Norwich, which was built by the city council in 2019 and won the RIBA Stirling prize for architecture the same year. This scheme created a carefully designed community of ultra-low-energy Passivhaus homes. It was announced last spring that seven residents want to buy their homes under the right-to-buy scheme and there is nothing Norwich city council can do to stop this. The number of social homes being lost continues to outnumber those being built.
Last year, government figures revealed that there was a net loss of 12,000 social homes in England, with sales and demolitions surpassing the number of homes built. The statistics showed that 22,023 social homes were either sold or demolished in 2023.
Devolved governments have abolished the right-to-buy policy entirely, in Scotland in 2016 and in Wales in 2019. We are outliers among European nations in allowing private sector landlords free rein to charge whatever the market will bear.
But as Labour has 44 landlord MPs who own a rental property that generates more than £10,000 a year, we are unlikely to see any meaningful action on that front. With their snouts in the trough, to what extent does Labour have any credibility left?
Kate Macintosh
Winchester
