It just been confirmed that the Prime Minister will be announcing this weekend (Saturday and Sunday 11th and 12th June) his plan to extend the Right To Buy scheme to housing associations.

The current Right to Buy scheme/policy in England, which has been scrapped in Wales and Scotland, allows tenants living in council homes to buy them and are given a discount as high as 70 per cent of the going market price, which depends on the length of time they have lived in the homes.

The maximum discount is capped at £87,200 and £116,200 in the capital.

There is an existing scheme for tenants in housing association ‘homes’ but it is far less generous with discounts of up to £16,000, however there is a widespread opinion that Johnston will considerably ramp up the discounts available to this type of renter.

When David Cameron was Prime Minister the government spent £200m on a ‘pathfinder’ project to see whether to extend Right to Buy to the housing association sector. The pilot was conducted with the NHF (National Housing Federation) which found that home replacement builds was far slower than the rate at which homes were sold off, but not only that the new builds were significantly smaller than the ones they were supposed to have replaced.

When contacted by the Financial Times an NHF spokesperson said: “Our agreement with the government at that time was based on a clear set of principles, our red line being that every single social home sold would be replaced. Recent pilots demonstrated how difficult this is to achieve, as there is not enough money from sales to build new social homes. Since this agreement was made the housing crisis has worsened. Our recent research shows that 4.2m people are in need of social housing in England today.”

In the early 1980s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher first introduced the Right To Buy scheme and around 1.6m council homes have been sold off to tenants.