Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Contrary to myth, the Tories were not alone in being interested in the Right to Buy. By the end of the 1970s, there were some 6½ million council houses in Britain, accounting for one in three households nationwide. That was an awful lot of potential voters, and after 1974 Harold Wilson’s senior advisers urged him to steal the Tories’ thunder by offering an alternative scheme. Wilson’s policy chief, Bernard Donoughue, had grown up in a council house and was acutely conscious of the petty restrictions that governed many tenants’ lives, from the council-mandated colour of their front doors to their inability to move at short notice. The Right to Buy, he argued, would give people ‘the freedom to decorate their homes as they wished and, very important, to move in pursuit of employment’. For months Donoughue worked on a plan allowing tenants to buy their council houses, with properties reverting to the local authority on the deaths of the owners or their dependants. Labour’s left-wing activists hated it, and Wilson allowed it to wither on the vine. Even so, it is tempting to wonder how different history would have been if Wilson or Callaghan had pursued it. At the very least, as the academic Peter King remarks, it would have strengthened their appeal to skilled working-class households in the so-called ‘Labour aristocracy’: precisely those voters, of course, who defected to Mrs Thatcher.7

  As it was, however, the Right to Buy remained a Conservative issue. During the run-up to the 1979 election, some Tories even argued that long-term tenants should simply be handed the keys, free of charge. As before, though, this made Mrs Thatcher nervous, since it might infuriate homeowners who had saved for years to pay off their mortgages. Instead, she approved a scheme devised by her Shadow Environment Minister, Michael Heseltine, with a sliding scale of discounts depending on how long tenants had been in their homes. Crucially, it would be enshrined in law, so local councils could not block it. And after the election, Heseltine put the plan into operation with unflagging vigour, combativeness and flair for publicity. Introducing the legislation in January 1980, he claimed that it was ‘far more than just another housing Bill’, and would rank among the ‘finest traditions and philosophies of the Conservative Party’. No act of Parliament, he insisted, had ever ‘enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the State to the people’. Reversing ‘the trend of ever-increasing dominance of the State over the life of the individual’, here was ‘the basis for perhaps as profound a social revolution as any in our history’.8

  The Right to Buy came into effect on 3 October 1980. Already the government had frozen the price of more than 5 million council houses, allowing tenants to buy them without worrying about inflation. On television and in the papers, the government ran a £600,000 advertising campaign explaining the discounts, which began at 33 per cent for people who had rented for three years and rose to 50 per cent for those who had rented for twenty years. In the meantime, with rather less fanfare, Heseltine was moving against local authorities themselves. Two months later, he announced an indefinite halt to all council spending on housing, banning them from borrowing any more money, entering into contracts or beginning work on new developments. Only when councils had proved that they could live within the government’s new cash limits would they be allowed to start building houses again. Labour promptly branded him a ‘housing-wrecker’, while the veteran left-winger Frank Allaun yelled across the Commons that Heseltine was ‘not a man or a Minister but a monster’. But for the Tories’ blond bombardier, as for Mrs Thatcher, abuse from the left merely proved that he was right.9

  Opposition to the Right to Buy was by no means confined to the Labour Party. The National Tenants’ Organization was dead against it, warning that it would ‘inevitably lead to a worsening of the housing crisis and soaring rents for council tenants’. The charity Shelter was equally damning, arguing that selling so many council houses would wreak ‘untold damage’ on the prospects of the homeless. Meanwhile, a survey found that almost all Labour-controlled authorities were against it, as well as almost one in three Conservative-controlled councils. This might seem surprising, given that the vast majority of councils in England and Wales had already sold some houses to their tenants. But what horrified so many councils was the government’s insistence that they had to sell their houses, whether they wanted to or not, which destroyed any semblance of local autonomy.

  In this respect, as Simon Jenkins wrote a few years later, the Right to Buy was not just a gigantic privatization, transferring billions of pounds of assets to individual families from the state. It was a colossal usurpation of power, with the central government effectively seizing control of millions of council houses. Like schools, public housing had always been seen as one of the essential elements of local government. Council houses belonged not to the government, but to the community. ‘They were symbols’, Jenkins wrote, ‘of the community’s role in determining the character of its neighbourhood and the welfare of its citizens.’ But now, thanks to Thatcher and Heseltine, that power had gone for good.10

  Even before the Housing Bill became law, some councils were drawing up plans to resist. Cornwall’s independent councils begged for exemption on the grounds that their houses would inevitably become ‘summer lets or second homes’, making it impossible for young Cornish people to buy locally. (The government took no notice, but the councillors were absolutely right.) Many Labour councils, notably Lambeth, Sheffield and Newcastle, simply refused to hand out application forms. ‘We are not stopping tenants from buying their homes,’ explained Swindon’s housing committee chairman. ‘The Act does not say that we have to hand out the forms. If the tenants manage to get the forms from elsewhere and fill them in correctly, then we will sell them their homes.’

  Meanwhile, Sheffield’s young council leader, David Blunkett, spent £6,500 recruiting two officials to ‘describe to potential buyers the disadvantages of home ownership’, much to the fury of his Conservative opponents. There were, he argued, 27,000 people on the waiting list for homes, including ‘large numbers of elderly and handicapped people’, and the council had no right to abandon them. His housing committee chairman, the future Labour MP Clive Betts, was particularly exercised by the case of John Bradshaw, a greengrocer with three shops, who had lived in a two-bedroom council house for the last three decades. The house was worth £10,500, but thanks to his government discount, Mr Bradshaw had just bought it for £5,150. To Sheffield’s Labour councillors, this was just not fair. ‘People like Mr Bradshaw’, said Betts, ‘can afford to go and buy a house on the private market. It is wrong that he is purchasing a community asset when there are people on the waiting list who cannot afford to buy their own home.’ But it was also, Blunkett added, a question of principle, for what was at stake was the ‘existence of local democracy itself’.11

  The struggle between central and local government would become a key theme of Mrs Thatcher’s years in office, but it was a battle she generally won. Heseltine’s Housing Act gave him the right to send in ‘commissioners’ to sell the houses if councils refused to do it, and throughout 1980 the government periodically threatened Labour-run councils with intervention. Rochdale and Greenwich even invited the government to send a commissioner, since as Rochdale’s leader put it, they did ‘not want to be any part [sic] to selling our houses’. The decisive battle, though, came in Norwich, where the Labour council took the fight all the way to the High Court. As it happened, the judge, Lord Denning, agreed that the Housing Act was a ‘most coercive power’, allowing ‘central government to interfere with a high hand over local authorities’, and warned that it might easily be ‘exceeded or misused’. But the law was the law, so Heseltine got his way.12

  Among the general public, not everybody approved of the Right to Buy. Probably very few people would have agreed with Basildon’s Peter Hibbitt, who told Mass Observation that ‘the whole concept of house purchase is to me one of the biggest confidence tricks ever perpetrated’. But anecdotal evidence suggests that older people, who had grown up with the idea that council houses were provided for the benefit of
working people, tended to be more suspicious. Talking to residents in a ‘bleak 1960s high-rise block’ on a hill overlooking Rochester, Kent, one reporter found that while younger people were very enthusiastic, and often said that the issue would persuade them to vote Conservative, their older neighbours were much warier. Council houses were meant ‘for people like us who could not afford to buy’, said 63-year-old Rosina Ramsden, a catering assistant. And when a Guardian reporter visited the suburban streets of Hodge Hill, Birmingham, she too met pensioners who thought the sales were unfair. Public housing was for the poor, agreed Harriet Emms and her neighbour Constance Jones. If people wanted to buy, they should ‘move out’ to the private estates and leave the council houses for somebody else.13

  In general, though, the Right to Buy was immensely popular. In the Birmingham conurbation, where some 25,000 tenants bought their council houses by the end of 1982, even reliable Labour voters said they approved of it. One was Melissa Jones, described as a ‘middle-aged immigrant from Jamaica’, who was just about to hand in her application. The council, she complained, had never got round to painting her front door; and since it would only cost her ‘£1 or £2 more each week to buy’ – well, why not? ‘Everyone should have the chance to buy his council home if he can afford it,’ agreed 59-year-old Cyril Wilson, who had lost his job and held Mrs Thatcher personally responsible. Indeed, it is striking how many people who voted Labour, had lost their jobs or simply could not stand Mrs Thatcher nevertheless heartily approved of the Right to Buy. ‘If you are a sitting tenant and you have got the money,’ said Albert Sutton, a 61-year-old Labour stalwart from Rochester, ‘good luck to you.’14

  When Mass Observation canvassed opinion in early 1982, the responses were no less illuminating. Here, for example, is Anne Eves: a middle-aged clerk, no fan of the Conservatives and sceptical about the principle of the Right to Buy, but nevertheless exasperated after decades of council tenancy:

  It has really got up my nose to be a second-class citizen in council housing. When first married the request for a mortgage was laughed at as my husband was never even in regular employment. Even though we had the required deposit and were paying a similar amount for furnished accommodation as would have been required for mortgage repayments, no-one would consider granting a mortgage.

  Now by kind permission of the lothesome [sic] Tories I am to be able to buy my council flat for the discounted price of £9,880 plus £25 per month service charge plus £25 per month Rates. The market value was put at £18,250 …

  I shall go ahead with the scheme even though I disagree with the principle of anyone being able to buy council stock as it is my only chance of owning my own place. Had I been able to buy in 1960 I would own my own house now and it would have cost about £2,500 and today be worth £25,000.

  For people like Anne, who had rented for so long with little hope of owning their own home, the Right to Buy seemed genuinely liberating. It did not mean that they became Conservatives overnight, or that they were blind to the risks of a mortgage, or that they forgot about the other economic problems of the day. Sheila Parkin and her husband, for example, had rented their council house in Brentwood, Essex, since 1955. It was now worth £29,000. Thanks to their discount, they had bought it for £10,760, while their monthly mortgage repayments were just £1 more than their old rent. Yet even as she recorded her pride at owning her own home, Sheila lamented that her son-in-law had been made redundant after eight years. In what seems a colossal irony, he had worked for the local council repairing their housing stock, but had lost his job thanks to ‘government cut-backs’. As Sheila noted, he had just ‘signed on the dole, a thing he has never done before, and is very bitter towards this government who do not seem to care’.15

  The most revealing letter, though, came a year later from Mary Richards in Newton Abbot. Here was a working-class woman in late middle age, precisely the kind of woman to whom the Labour Party was dedicated, and very far from being an automatic admirer of Mrs Thatcher. Yet she was bewildered by Labour’s reluctance to embrace the principle of home ownership:

  I sometimes think that even the Labour Party do not seem to want to see working people get out of the rut in case they vote for another party, hence the dislike for selling council houses.

  We don’t want charity but we want the chance to better our lot when the opportunities arise and they don’t come often in a lifetime.

  My son who hopes he can (if he lives very economically) buy his council house said, ‘If Mrs Thatcher gets in I can buy my house but am likely to loose [sic] my job but if Labour gets in my job would be reasonably safe but I will not be able to buy my house.’

  Perhaps not surprisingly, he split the difference and voted Liberal.16

  The Right to Buy was an immediate hit. Beforehand, some critics had poured scorn on the idea of popular demand. The journalist David Walker, later Mr Polly Toynbee, assured readers of The Times that demand would be ‘very small’ and that sales would involve ‘no large fraction of council housing’. Yet in the first twelve weeks alone, more than 100,000 people submitted application forms, the total rising to more than 250,000 by the following June and a whopping 380,000 by October. Behind these figures were hundreds of thousands of families, eagerly looking forward to seeing their names on the deeds of their home, putting in new doors or windows, repainting the outside, perhaps even building an extension. And as the forms flooded in, Mrs Thatcher could barely contain her delight.

  ‘Wherever we can we shall extend the opportunity for personal ownership and the self-respect that goes with it,’ she told her party conference in 1982:

  Half a million more people will now live and grow up as freeholders with a real stake in the country and with something to pass on to their children. There is no prouder word in our history than ‘freeholder’.

  Mr President, this is the largest transfer of assets from the State to the family in British history and it was done by a Conservative Government. And this really will be an irreversible shift of power to the people.

  The Labour Party may huff and puff about putting a stop to the sale of council houses. They may go on making life unpleasant for those who try to take advantage of their legal rights, and what a wicked thing it is to do that. But they do not dare pledge themselves to take those houses back because they know we are right, because they know it is what the people want.

  The people did want it. By the end of 1981 some 86,545 council houses had changed hands, rising to 290,874 a year later and 438,082 by the end of 1983. For the rest of the decade, more than 100,000 houses were sold almost every year. Never before had the Conservative dream of a property-owning democracy come closer to being a reality. ‘Everyone – almost everyone, the overwhelming majority – of people … will be able to say: “Look, they have got something to inherit. They have got a basis to start on!”’ Mrs Thatcher proudly remarked. ‘That is tremendous. That is popular capitalism.’17

  Yet more than almost any other policy of the 1980s, the Right to Buy reflected the sharp divisions in British society. Most of the early sales were in suburban southern England. In Scotland and many northern cities, sales were very slow, not least because councils practised what David Walker called a mixture of ‘town hall delays, obscurantism … obstruction [and] outright intimidation’. Despite Mrs Thatcher’s hopes, many of the biggest urban estates saw virtually no applications, while people who wanted to buy flats in post-war tower blocks were vanishingly rare. Yet, as so often, the North–South divide was a bit simplistic: while people might have expected Bromley in south-east London to be keen sellers, who would have predicted that Nottingham, York and Berwick-upon-Tweed would be so keen to get rid of their council houses? Even the political divide was often misleading. Some Conservative councils, particularly in rural areas, owned relatively few houses and had no desire to hand them over. But others went out of their way to encourage prospective buyers. Rochester, almost unbelievably, put on a quiz with ‘questions on home ownership, with a tie breaker if nece
ssary’, judged by a panel of councillors and local estate agents. The prize was, of course, a free council house.18

  As for the homeowners who benefited from Mrs Thatcher’s revolution, they tended to be very particular kinds of people. Older tenants were naturally at an advantage, because they often qualified for the most handsome discounts. And although the Right to Buy was aimed at young couples embarking on married life, surveys found that buyers were typically middle-aged or older couples with children. In the early years, at least, they generally came from small towns and suburbs in the south and the Midlands, such as Maidstone, Bracknell and Hemel Hempstead. By and large, they lived on small, well-maintained estates of semi-detached or terraced cottages, usually with gardens. They were certainly not poor: the great majority of husbands and wives were in full-time work, most had skilled manual or white-collar jobs and they typically brought home twice as much money as people who continued to rent. These, in other words, were ‘respectable’ people living on ‘good’ estates, the kind of people who had been keen to climb on to the housing ladder for years, but had never been able to obtain a mortgage. They were also, incidentally, the kind of confident, aspirational working-class voters the Tories had been courting for at least a century.19

  Many years later, the housing academic Peter King suggested that the reason the Right to Buy had been so popular was that, unusually for a government policy, it transferred assets ‘permanently and unconditionally’ from the state to the family. It appealed directly to people’s desire for privacy and control; it addressed them as individuals rather than groups; ‘it did not seek to tell households what they wanted and how they should live’, but rewarded ‘private interest and aspirations’. Above all, it appealed to what King calls ‘mineness’: people’s sense of place and belonging, rooted in the principle of ownership. No wonder, then, that new homeowners could not wait to repaint their front doors, to put in new windows, fences and porches, to install new fireplaces, bathrooms and kitchens. Home improvements demonstrated that their houses were theirs, and that they were free to put their mark on them. ‘I stood and looked at that kitchen ceiling for a quarter of an hour last night after I finished it,’ one man said. ‘I know it’s silly but it’s the satisfaction you get. And I wouldn’t feel like that if I didn’t own the place.’20