Thousands of council tenants have signed a petition calling on Angela Rayner to scrap her plans to reduce the Right to Buy discount by thousands of pounds.
The deputy PM and secretary of state for housing is a former council house tenant who benefited from being able to buy her council house at a reduced price.
But in October she announced plans to reduce the cap on tenants’ maximum savings from £136,400 to just £38,000.
The announcement came with a deadline of November 21 for hopeful buyers to buy their house at the old, discounted price, meaning many simply did not have enough time to do so.
Right to buy was introduced in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher and allowed council house tenants to buy their social housing from their local authority if they had lived in it for a minimum of three years.
Ms Rayner benefitted from the scheme in 2007 when she bought her council house in Stockport, Greater Manchester for £79,000 with a 25% discount. She subsequently sold the property and made a profit of £48,500.
The government is also considering plans to raise the time a person must have lived in the house before being able to purchase it, with the potential that this could be increased to 10 years.
A similar increase could be made to the time a buyer has to wait before being able to sell the house after purchase. Currently, if the house is sold within the first five years, some of all of the discount must be repaid.
But the move has sparked anger amongst those aspiring to purchase their council home in the way that Angela Rayner did, with a petition calling for her to reverse her decision being signed by more than 3,000 people.
Julie Padfield was one of the lucky few who managed to purchase her houses before the November deadline and believes that the “unfair” decision is an act of “discrimination” against social tenants.
She told the Telegraph: “Now only being able to buy with such a reduced amount means they [social homes] will be unaffordable for most people.
“Agreements which stipulate a reduction [in the price] for the amount of years you have been a tenant are written into most contracts. They [the Government] should uphold the original agreement, and maybe introduce the reduced reduction for new tenants.
“Although many have bought their council houses, and rightfully too, many have been sold to housing associations and multi-tenancy landlords – something which never seems to get mentioned.”
Currently, the discount available is either 70% of the total value of a home or a maximum figure ranging from £22,000-£38,000 depending on region, with whichever is the lowest value being the one on offer.
