London should be able to set its own rules on whether council tenants are allowed to buy their own homes, Sadiq Khan has said.He appeared to suggest that borough councils should have the ability to depart from national rules and decide for themselves whether to “pause, stop or continue” with the right to buy scheme.
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00:00Do you think the right-to-buy rules for people living in council houses should be scrapped?
00:05I think the government should devolve to London the ability to decide whether to pause it,
00:10to stop it, or for it to continue. We're the best people who know the position in London.
00:15My anxiety about right-to-buy is that over the last 40-odd years, you look back for every
00:21six homes sold off, only one's been built, of course I understand, as somebody who went
00:25through this, the aspiration all of us have to be homeowners, and right-to-buy enabled
00:29people who were council tenants to be homeowners. The challenge is replenishing the stock, and
00:35so if the government was to devolve to us the powers, we who know London's best could
00:38decide what to do.
00:39Because according to the London Assembly's annual housing report, you've actually completed
00:45about 8,500 council houses since 2018, but about 13,000 council houses have been lost
00:52under right-to-buy, so you're sort of winning but losing even more.
00:57Yes and no. Don't forget, a lot of those people who buy their homes under right-to-buy are
01:01previous tenants who fulfilled their wish, dream, aspiration to be homeowners. It's not
01:05necessarily the case that those houses have left those who are Londoners, who are people
01:12who need subsidised housing. The issue is, over the course of many years, those have
01:18been sold off to people who sublet them, and so you often have council estates, tenants
01:24next to each other, one of whom is a council tenant, paying a social rent, living next
01:28to somebody who is a tenant with a private landlord, who's previously bought the home
01:33under right-to-buy.
01:34The issue that I make to the government is, look, the issue of right-to-buy is very contentious
01:39because this stock, over a period of time, leaves the social housing stock, and so if
01:44you give to us the powers to decide when it's right to pause, when it's right to suspend,
01:48when it's right for it to carry on, we're the best people to do that.
01:51You've got plans for 40,000 council houses by 2030 in London. Is that to start them or
01:57to finish them?
01:58It's to complete them by 2030.
02:00Okay, so you're quite a long way to go then, because you've got to about 8,500 by April.
02:04Do you think you can do that?
02:05There's a lot in the pipeline, and we think, with the right support from the government,
02:08we can definitely do that.