Phil Salter, a 79-year-old retired carpenter, lives in a 17th-century fisherman’s cottage in the Cornish village of St Mawes. He bought it in 1989 for £55,000 plus his old home. He enjoys sitting outside on the front wall with a gin and tonic. “I like to watch the world go by. People stop and speak. I just find it lovely.”
Salter’s former home, which he offered in part exchange for the cottage, was a council house up the road. He bought it from his local authority under the Right to Buy scheme introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1980. As a sitting tenant, he was offered a substantial discount: he paid £17,000 and had it valued at £80,000 a few years later. His current home, priced at £135,000 in 1989, is now valued at about £1m. “But if it went up for auction — who knows?” he says.
St Mawes is changing. Throughout the 20th century, most cottages in the village were rented by local fishermen or tradesmen. Now about a third are used as second homes or holiday homes to let. Salter has often seen “a perfectly good house in the process of being demolished because they don’t like the look of it”. He has a name for these moneyed owner-developers — “house farmers”, people who come to St Mawes, buy a property and then either pull it down or apply for extensions. “Then it’ll go back on the market, over and over again,” Salter says.
When Salter bought his council house he couldn’t have imagined it would, somewhere along the way, make him a millionaire. For his children and grandchildren, he says, it is a different story: “The prices in St Mawes, whatever property, are out of reach for any working family.” Mortgage lender Halifax reports that the average price in the village jumped from £339,912 to £501,638 in the 12 months to January 2021.
This year, I set out with Laurence Grissell, a BBC radio producer, to trace the story of Britain’s housing through 10 different dwellings, interviewing the people who live in them about what their home — and the idea of home — means to them. The idea grew from a sense that housing has come to dominate people’s lives.
What I didn’t expect was to have my hunch proved, and reinforced, so often. In Solva, Pembrokeshire, we met a couple in their twenties — both working full-time, one raised in the village — who have spent the past year living in a static caravan and dread spending another winter in it. Buying is out of the question, and there are few homes to rent: 75 per cent of houses in Lower Solva are second homes.
One of the recurring themes that stood out on our travels was the impact of Right to Buy: so firmly associated with the Tories, but which Labour in the late 1970s was also planning to implement. It was hard to find anyone whose history didn’t have some defining relationship with council housing — not that surprising, given that about 40 per cent of Britons lived in local authority homes by 1979.
It wasn’t only Salter who got his foot on the ladder with Right to Buy. When we spoke to 32-year-old Danielle, in Tooting, south London, she was still living with her mother 11 years after graduating from university, unable to afford housing in the area she grew up in. Her mother Lydia had bought the home — a beautiful three-bedroom Edwardian terrace — in 1990 after selling the one-bedroom flat she too had bought from the council. At the time, she bought their terraced home as a single person on a PA’s salary. It’s now worth £750,000.
Right to Buy also determined the economic fortunes of Simon Manton Milne, a 38-year-old software developer who grew up in a council house on the Shetland Islands that his widowed mother bought when he was a child.
Manton Milne bought his first flat while still a teenager, as a student in Glasgow, using a small inheritance as the deposit. Then, in 2002, his mother died and he inherited the ex-council house, selling it and paying off his mortgage at the age of 20. His status as an outright homeowner makes him a rarity among his millennial peers — and among the last of a generation who could profit directly from the first flush of the Right to Buy scheme.
In the 1980s and 1990s, home ownership became a signifier of financial independence and aspiration. Social housing was stigmatised and the prospect of a secure — even life-long — council tenancy was regarded as stifling. Yet between the Right to Buy revolution and the 1996 introduction of buy-to-let mortgages, security and affordability have been squeezed: the number of people renting privately has doubled in 15 years.
As the geographer Brett Christophers highlights in his 2020 book Rentier Capitalism, the rate of owner-occupancy in Britain now stands only 7 percentage points higher than it did in 1980, the year the Right to Buy was introduced, when it was 55 per cent. Overall, Thatcher’s policy hasn’t served as an engine of working-class owner-occupation but as a catalyst for the transfer of rental income from local authorities to private landlords, free to charge as much as the market will stand.
In Crawley, West Sussex, I met Dorine, a 30-year-old Mauritian who has lived in Britain since her teens. She lives in a postwar two-bedroom ex-council flat with her husband, two teenage sisters, and three young children. The teenagers, 18 and 14, bunk up with the nine-year-old and six-year-old, while their three-year-old sleeps in with her parents. Black mould creeps around the low ceilings, the kitchen tap only runs hot and chunks of crumbling plaster fall on them while they shower.
If the flat were still council-owned, Dorine says that their rent would be about £450 a month. As it’s now owned privately, the rent is £950. Much of this is covered by universal credit, though fluctuations in her husband’s working hours mean that some months they don’t qualify for any support with housing costs.
In other words, housing still costs the state money: it’s just that what it spends no longer translates into new homes. Rather than enabling local authorities to build housing for security and revenue, the public purse is used to subsidise private landlords. In 2018, the Chartered Institute of Housing found that 95.7 per cent of the government housing budget went on housing benefit and mortgage support in the in 2015-16 fiscal year, compared with 18 per cent in 1975-76. Spending on social housing fell to £5.1bn in 2017 from £13.7bn in 1979-80 (in 2018 prices).
The key question I came away asking was how much home ownership per se matters. Are we a nation of property hoarders by nature, or because of manufactured scarcity? I saw a clear generational divide between older owners, who view property as a form of social and economic mobility, and younger renters, so weary of the insecurity and expense of renting that having “a home of their own” simply meant one they wouldn’t get thrown out of.
One image has stayed with me: Danielle from Tooting told me of her “little daydream” of having a place of her own, which mirrored so closely what was said by Salter, the accidental property millionaire. “I just have this vision of sitting in my little chair and table with my morning coffee, just looking out . . . I look forward to that day where I can sit and I think, ‘I’m home’, you know?”
Lynsey Hanley presents “A Home of Our Own”, continuing this week on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds
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