The Brutal Truths About UK Housing

> giving prominence by the Thatcherite privatisation of the public owned rental stock of council homes.

Worth noting that Labour suggested this policy first.

It's not the selling of council built housing to people who live in them that was the problem.

Selling them off cheap, and then not using the money raised to build more housing to repeat the cycle is the bad bit.

Housing/land isn't a free market. Maybe with Land Value Tax it could get closer, but the government building housing and the supporting services and then getting paid back by selling the housing to people in the community is not a bad idea that follows the same dynamic.

Buying votes from those home owners at the expense of everyone else, including their children is where it goes wrong. It's a Ponzi scheme, not a productive economy.

> Local authorities have had the ability to sell council houses to their tenants since the Housing Act 1936, but until the early 1970s such sales were limited: between 1957 and 1964, some 16,000 council houses were sold in England. The Labour Party initially proposed the idea of the right of tenants to own the house they live in, in their manifesto for the 1959 UK general election, which they lost.[10] In 1968, a circular was issued limiting sales in cities but was withdrawn by an incoming Conservative government in 1970.[11]

> In the meantime, council house sales to tenants began to increase. Some 7,000 were sold to their tenants during 1970; this soared to more than 45,000 in 1972.[12]