By Keith Cooper

Something astonishing happened after the chancellor sat down after her autumn budget in October, and it could seriously harm the government’s ambition to tackle the housing crisis.

Tens of thousands of tenants, an unprecedented number in some councils, dashed off letters to their local authorities in a last-ditch attempt to exercise the right to buy their homes.

Hillingdon Council, in west London, got 300 RTB applications through its doors in November – more than 100 times the three it usually receives in a month. Birmingham Council received more than 5,100 instead of 200. Wolverhampton, Bristol, Sandwell, and Greenwich each had more than 1,000 through their door that same month instead of the handful they usually do.

To give you some sense of the extraordinary scale of these rises, the last time a Labour government made deep cuts to RTB discounts in 1999, the number of applications rose by just 14%.

The trigger for last year’s sudden rush was, of course, Rachel Reeves’ budget decision to cut RTB discounts. Tenants were given just three weeks to secure the maximum RTB saving before the 21 November deadline set by the Treasury. The next day, maximum discounts on offer dropped dramatically from £136,000 to £16,000 in most London boroughs and from £102,000 to £38,000 outside the capital.

News of these unprecedented hikes in applications prompted a ripple of headlines in January after the Local Government Association warned of a “significant increase” in the applications and an HQN investigation uncovered more “extraordinary” and “regrettable” jumps last month.

The government says it recognises that “many local authorities” saw increases in RTB applications following the autumn budget but expects “higher levels” of “speculative applications”. Between 40% to 50% of applications usually translate into sales and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is banking on 1,700 social homes being sold off every year in the long term.

Councils have, however, been doing their own calculations and their predictions for RTB sales this year make for uncomfortable reading.

For instance, Greenwich Council expects to sell 350 council homes this year compared to 78 in 2023/24, the last year for which official figures are available. The London borough also expects to lose 200 more homes next year, thanks – or no thanks – to the 1,022 applications it received following the autumn budget. Pity poor Birmingham and the 5,117 it received.

Wolverhampton expects 600 sales compared to 175 in 2023/24. Doncaster’s RTB sales will more than double from 93 to 240 over the same period. Crawley Council’s most “prudent” assumption is 50 RTB sales – an almost four-fold increase – but has also modelled for 150.

According to my conservative calculations produced for newspaper The I, this surge in RTB sales could cancel out the government’s plans to build more 18,000 “social and affordable” homes this year. These figures are based on sales predictions from a sample of 20 authorities in urban and rural areas. Together they predict 3,374 RTB sales in 2025/26, 162% more than the 1,288 they sold in 2023/24. When this rise is applied to sales across England it suggests national RTB sales of 18,510 homes, almost double the number of actually affordable socially rented homes which were built in 2023/24.

Into this mix of multi-fold rises in applications and sales is the response of our old friend, the market. Barclays Bank kindly stepped up to the plate in April to offer “zero deposit” mortgages to RTB applicants. Leeds Building Society is also offering “right to buy lending for up to 100% of the borrowers’ discounted purchase price”. Business must be booming.

What could possibly go wrong?