Absolutely. That’s the argument I’ve been putting here for over 13 years.

As the opening paragraph of the October 2014 ‘Homes for All’ manifesto states, ‘There is a housing crisis.’ This crisis has been caused by Labour’s failure to build new affordable homes, not the right to buy, which has been emasculated under Labour and seen sales dwindle from the thousands to just a few hundred each year. Instead, Welsh Conservatives proposed to reform the right to buy, investing the proceeds of council sales in new social housing, thereby increasing housing supply and helping to tackle Labour’s housing supply crisis. This reflects the re-invigorated right-to-buy policy in England, where the UK Government committed to reinvest, for the first time ever, the additional receipts from right-to-buy sales in new affordable rented housing across England as a whole. If a council were to fail to spend the receipts on new affordable rented housing within three years, it would be required to return the unspent money to Government with interest, providing a strong financial incentive for councils to get on with building more homes for local people.

Since 2010, more than twice as much council housing has been built in England than in all of the 13 years combined of the last Labour Government, when English waiting lists nearly doubled as the number of social homes for rent was cut by 421,000. As a council tenant told me,

‘The right to buy scheme offers us the opportunity to plan for a future without requiring state assistance…I urge you to do anything in your power to oppose the proposal to end the Right to Buy in Wales.’

Instead of traipsing out 30-year-old dogma, the Welsh Government should be helping people like this and using every available tool to tackle their housing supply crisis, which they have imposed on Wales.