London (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Mayor Sadiq Khan said London should be capable of setting its own laws on whether council tenants are authorised to buy their own homes.
London’s mayor appeared to indicate that borough councils should have the capacity to depart from national rules and decide for themselves whether to “pause, stop or continue” with the right-to-buy scheme The London mayor’s remarks come amid reports that Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is due to declare that council tenants will have to live in their homes for five to 10 years before being qualified to buy them – far longer than the three-year rule that exist at present.
According to The Standard, Mr Khan said: “I think the Government should devolve to London the ability to decide whether to pause it, to stop it or for it to continue. We are the best people who know the standing in London. My anxiety about the right to buy is that over the last 40-odd years, for every six homes sold off, only one has been built.”
Since Mr Khan became mayor, a total of 13,575 council homes in London have been peddled under the right-to-buy scheme. At the same time, Mr Khan has made the construction of new homes a key part of hitting his inexpensive housing targets. He has pledged to build 40,000 new council homes by 2030. By April 2024, a total of 24,031 council homes had been begun in London and 8,862 completed – meaning there are nearly 5,000 fewer council homes in the capital than when Mr Khan came to power in 2016.
Should London be allowed to set its own housing laws?
Mr Khan described to The Standard: “Of course, I understand, as somebody who went through this, the aspiration that all of us have to be homeowners, and the right to buy enabled people who were council tenants to be homeowners. The challenge is replenishing the stock. If the Government wants to devolve to us the powers, we who know London best can decide what to do.
“A lot of those people who purchase their homes under the right to buy are previous tenants who have fulfilled their wish, dream, aspiration to be homeowners. It’s not necessarily the case that those houses have left Londoners who need subsidised housing. The issue is that over many years, these have been sold off to people who sub-let them. You often have on council estates tenants next to each other, one of whom is a council tenant giving a social rent, living next to somebody who is a tenant with a private landlord who has previously bought that under the right to buy.”