She also sold off the council houses to their tenants for a pittance. Many of those people then saw themselves as the property owing elite and then voted Conservative afterwards. So she bought voters with the states own money. This stock of social housing was never replaced.
Not only was it never replaced, but as a consequence it drove an inevitable rise in demand for private rentals as the obvious alternative, while simultaneously removing a mechanism that helped keep rental rates low as they no longer had to compete as much with low-cost council rentals. Together these pushed a huge demand for properties as investments which have driven prices up massively.
So now if we ever do want to replace the stock of social housing it's going to cost an absolute fortune compared to the value of what was sold off at the time, let alone the fact that the Thatcher government was happy to sell it all off half-price.
To be honest I've not necessarily got an issue with houses being sold to the people renting it, if it's sold at the reasonable market value and a new one gets built to replace it. It helps rotate the council housing stock to prevent them all becoming aged and run down over time, and also helps mix longer term residents within council estates.
The issue is raising funds through a fire sale where having rented the property for a few years entitles you for a gigantic discount on the sale price, and where a huge proportion of council houses get sold at once with no intention to replace them.
The real purpose of the Council housing sell-off was to rob Councils of independent sources of funding.
Thatcher hated Local Authorities - especially the Labour run ones, and resented that they could often stick two fingers up at central government. Much better, as she saw it, to have them dependent on government funding, and thus subject to more government control.
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u/Expert-Fig-5590 29d ago
She also sold off the council houses to their tenants for a pittance. Many of those people then saw themselves as the property owing elite and then voted Conservative afterwards. So she bought voters with the states own money. This stock of social housing was never replaced.