Quote:
Originally Posted by garinda
Not disputing that statement, but do we have any figures to illustrate who built what?
Or are we talikng under ten houses being built, in total?
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http://www.communities.gov.uk/docume...ls/1473575.xls
From 1980-89 392,090 local authority houses were built. From 2000-09 it was just 3,500.
Obviously you can see from those figures that as time goes on less and less local authority housing was built.
75% of the money the local authority gets from Right to Buy sales has to be used to pay down local authority debts. The other 25% can be used to carry out capital expenditure, so can be immediately put towards building more local authority housing if the council wishes. If the debt is already paid off then they can use 100% of it for capital projects.
If the rule wasn't in place then local authorities would still need to pay down the debts, so they'd just be forced to borrow more to sustain the debt if they wanted to build more houses with Right to Buy money. I'm not sure where we're at in terms of the spending of Right to Buy receipts now. I know there were proposals to pool receipts nationally which would adversely affect local authorities who haven't got huge capital debts, but I'm not sure if they're in effect or not.