The Conservatives have announced this morning (14 April) that if re-elected next month, they will extend the Right to Buy to up to 1.3m tenants of housing associations in England and create a £1bn Brownfield Regeneration Fund to unlock 400,000 new homes.
The statement on the party’s website came ahead of the publication of their full manifesto later today.
The pre-election pledge would see tens of thousands of housing association tenants take up a discount on buying a housing association property each year, capped at just over £102,700 in London and £77,000 for the rest of England.
This will be accompanied by a requirement that councils sell their most valuable 210,000 properties from remaining housing stock.
The Right to Buy scheme, credited with taking Margaret Thatcher to election victory in the 1980s, gives secure tenants of councils and some housing associations the legal right to buy, at a large discount, the home they are living in.
The original scheme has since then accounted for more than 2m council houses sold. However, there are now around 800,000 housing association tenants with a limited Right to Acquire, which is for assured tenants of housing association homes built with public subsidy after 1997.
Maximum discounts for Right to Buy are capped at between £9,000 and £16,000 but under the new Tory rules they would be given a 35 per cent discount, increasing by 1 per cent for every extra year they have been in the property. Tenants in flats would be entitled to a 50 per cent discount, going up 2 per cent every year.
According to the Telegraph, the manifesto is also expected to unveil a policy to ensure that a person on the minimum wage does not pay income tax.
Under a Conservative government the minimum wage will be linked to the personal allowance, which the Tories want to increase to £12,500 by the end of the next parliament.
It means that if the minimum wage increases faster than expected, workers will always be exempt from paying income tax.
It follows promises made over the weekend that the Tories would scrap inheritance tax on homes worth up to £1m, funded by a reduction in pension tax relief for additional rate taxpayers who earn £150,000 or more.
Yesterday (13 April), the Labour Party became the first to officially publish their manifesto, which also included pledges on housing.
Their leader Ed Miliband’s confirmed the controversial mansion tax to pay for a £2.5bn NHS funding package, while also committing to getting 200,000 homes a year get built by 2020 - almost double the current level - and legislating to make three-year tenancies the norm, with a ceiling on excessive rent rises of 1 per cent above inflation.
peter.walker@ft.com
