Right to buy should not just be for local authorities

By Mark Henderson Guardian Professional

Extending the right to housing associations could allow government to reinvest £40bn it has spent on social housing

 The eagle-eyed reader of Monday's housing strategy is unlikely to have spotted the figure of £40bn. Unlikely, because it wasn't in there: £40bn, or thereabouts, is the investment made by governments dating back over the past half a century in developing the UK's current social housing stock.
This money is something of an anomaly, sitting on the balance sheets of housing associations the length and breadth of the land, with no repayment to Treasury.
While these forgotten millions are largely an historic hangover, there is a real role that funding can play in becoming a lynch-pin of the government's housing strategy.
David Cameron and the housing minister, Grant Shapps, have clearly embraced the role that right-to-buy can play in stimulating the housing market. But by focusing on bolstering access to finance for local authority tenants, they are ignoring a real growth area for this policy.
Housing associations own 2.4 million homes in England alone, about 700,000 more than local authorities. Due to the legacy of skewed policy, housing association tenants have not had the same access to owning their own properties.
Our calculations show that if the government mirrored right-to-buy policy and the planned increase in the size of deposit for housing associations, it could realise at least an additional 100,000 property sales.
I welcome the inclusion of a one for one golden rule to preserve the number of available homes. This is essential, and it is core to my reference to the historic social housing grant above.
Home Group contends that if the government used this money to create a genuinely accessible right-to-buy scheme for housing association stock, it would effectively reinvest some of that £40bn back into the market. Housing associations would use the historic grant to pay part of their tenants' deposits and then re-invest the remainder to build a replacement property.
This isn't without its hurdles; all grants are paid at varying rates so we would need some smoothing out to ensure equity was available for all. And as the UK's largest rural social housing provider we recognise that replacing one for one would be harder due to the availability of land – but this should not be insurmountable when working with local community land trusts and the surrounding communities.
As a means to ignite house building though, without the Treasury having to dip into its depleted coffers, it is surely worthy of merit.
We need one rule for all when it comes to offering right to buy for housing tenants, backed by one for one, to make this happen.