Homes may be bought using housing benefit in new proposal

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is to set out his vision for lower-paid workers to be able to use housing benefits to buy their homes – and an extension of the right to buy for housing association tenants – in a speech in Lancashire today. The Prime Minister is seeking to repair his fortunes after a bruising Tory revolt against his leadership.

He will hope the pledges to assist individuals onto the property ladder will please rebel MPs and voters who are facing fresh pressures from the cost-of-living crisis. Mr Johnson will commit to detail “reforms to help people cut costs in every area of household expenditure” over the coming weeks.

He will argue that £30 billion in housing benefit that currently goes towards rent could help people secure and pay for mortgages, according to the Times, which first reported the plan. But the newspaper said his separate desire to give millions of tenants the ability to pay for housing association properties at discounts of up to 70% is likely to be limited to a series of pilots for now, without additional Government funding.

The plan could, however, differ from Margaret Thatcher’s original right-to-buy policy with a possible commitment to ensure every home bought under the scheme would be replaced to ensure the stock is not run down.

Shadow minister Jess Phillips was among those questioning how the housing benefits policy will work because individuals with more than £16,000 in savings and investments do not qualify for Universal Credit. “It’s almost as if Boris Johnson doesn’t do much benefits casework,” the Labour MP quipped.

On Wednesday, Mr Johnson said the Government will be “expanding home ownership for millions of people” as he vowed to continue in No 10 despite 148 of his own MPs failing to back him in a vote of confidence earlier in the week. Downing Street’s press notice issued ahead of the speech contained little detail about the plans, but the PA news agency has been told Mr Johnson will confirm his intention to give tenants of housing association properties the right to buy their homes.

Proposals for renters to be able to buy their social homes at a discount are not new, and appeared in David Cameron’s 2015 Conservative manifesto. After that pledge failed to materialise, Mr Johnson committed to consider new pilots for the scheme ahead of the 2019 general election.

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