The impact of the Right to Buy for housing association tenants and forced sale of higher value council homes

Wed 3 February 2016

Mill Lane Lecture Rooms

The Housing and Planning Bill, currently going through parliament, introduces two new important changes affecting the social housing sector in England. Housing Association tenants will be given the Right-to-Buy their home with similar discounts to those already available to council tenants. Housing associations are expected to replace the stock they sell and the funding to compensate them for selling at discounted rates will be made available from the sale of higher value council-owned properties when they become vacant. Analysis recently carried out by the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation explored the likely scale of sales of social housing under both policies, and the impact of the sales and the replacement stock on rent levels and on poverty of low income households seeking social housing. The research found that both policies will cause an initial reduction in available lets of social housing, but that in the longer term the rent level of the replacement stock determines the poverty impact of both policies.

Biography
Anna Clarke is a Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research, within the Land Economy Department.
Her research interests include housing need, homelessness, demand for social housing and low cost home ownership, worklessness and a growing area of work around welfare reform.
She was the lead author on the recent analysis commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation exploring the poverty impacts of the Right to Buy for housing association tenants and sale of higher value local authority dwellings, which was published recently.
Anna has recently published work for the Department for Work and Pensions on the housing benefit reforms affecting under-occupiers, and has also recently completed work on youth homelessness for Centrepoint. Her current projects include study for the ESRC on how housing providers can tackle youth poverty.

Cost: Free