Usually the Labour Party at least pay lip service to supporting the aspiration of home ownership.
Labour-run Enfield Council are making no such pretence.
They are boasting of setting up a housing company as a means of denying local residents the right to buy
Their press release says:
“The new company, if agreement is reached, would be wholly owned by the council and be exempt from right to buy obligations – meaning that the properties would be owned by the council until the authority chose to sell them.”
As The Guardian reported:
“In defiance of Eric Pickles, it is using a loophole that means it won’t give tenants the right to buy.”
Right to Buy sales have quadrupled since the discounts were increased in April 2012. The sales have risen from 2,638 in 2011-12 to 11,238 in 2013-14. As of June 2014, the overall number of homes sold under the reinvigorated Right to Buy has risen to nearly 22,500.
Labour’s Lyons housing review calls for Right to Buy to be ‘reviewed’.
It said:
“A new government should undertake an early review of the Right to Buy to establish whether it is meeting its policy objectives, the distribution of receipts from sales and on the total level of affordable housing stock.”
That sounds to be like code for undermining the Right to Buy.
We don’t know what the Labour manifesto will say about home ownership.
However we can see that the Labour Party in Enfield wish the dream of home ownership to remain unfulfilled for council tenants. Nobody else in the Labour Party has repudiated them.