Of all the policies imposed on Britain by Conservative governments, few have reshaped the country’s fortunes as enduringly as right to buy. For a lucky few, the policy has meant colossal windfalls and the chance to snap up some of the best properties in the country on the cheap. For the rest, right to buy has meant rising homelessness, spiralling rents and local authorities facing bankruptcy as the social housing stock dwindles, year by year.

In a mere four decades, Margaret Thatcher’s flagship initiative, forcing councils to sell off public housing at huge discounts, has seen two-thirds of British council homes privatised. City halls across the country are now on the brink of insolvency, in large part due to the enormous cost of having to provide temporary accommodation without enough council-owned homes left to go round.

It’s not just historic flats from Britain’s postwar housebuilding boom that are being sold. Brand new council houses are also going under the hammer, almost as fast as they are being built. Design blog Dezeen revealed this month that seven of Norwich’s newest council homes are already in the process of being sold off, fewer than five years after they were completed. Other authorities have also been forced to sell their new council homes, such as Hackney in east London, which has already lost some of the social housing it built in Stoke Newington in 2018.

Despite right to buy being so destructive to public finances that it has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, Labour has announced it........

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