Rayner says she will ‘fix’ Right to Buy scheme and make it a ‘fair system’

Angela Rayner has said she intends to “fix” the Right to Buy scheme and make it a “fair system” for taxpayers and tenants.

Speaking at a Labour conference fringe event in Liverpool, the Deputy Prime Minister suggested that changes had to be made to the scheme to secure “social housing into the future”.

Right to Buy legislation allows tenants renting local authority-owned homes to buy them at a discounted rate.

Ms Rayner said: “Housing is not just about a house, housing is about a home.

“It’s about people’s social wellbeing, it’s about people’s health, it’s about people’s education, it’s about people’s recreation, it’s about support, it affects every single aspect of a person’s life, so we have to have a whole Government approach to it.

“But this Labour Government is absolutely determined that we will have the biggest wave of social housing of a generation, and we are also going to have to fix the situation in Right to Buy.

“I’ve said that I’ll do a consultation on this, but the changes that they made in 2012 mean that more of our council homes are being sold off and we just can’t replace them.

“So there’s no point in me having the biggest wave in a generation of council homes through one way, and then not being able to replace them as they go out the door the next.

“So we’ve got to have a fair system.

“And, I think if you’ve raised your kids, you’ve lived in the house for decades and you want to buy the house, I think it’s absolutely reasonable and right that people should be given that opportunity.

“But I also believe that we can’t have a situation where taxpayers are funding social housing and actually we can’t replace that social housing because of the discount.

“So I’m starting a conversation on that, to make sure that we fix that end of the scale as well, so that we can make sure we can keep our social housing into the future.”

Touching on her own experience of growing up in a council house, Ms Rayner said: “I might have grown up in poverty but one thing we had and that was a secure council house.

“We never felt that we were going to get evicted, we never felt that we had to move from pillar to post.”