Long ago I attended a meeting in St Andrews House where Wendy Alexander and Duncan Maclennan told us that (almost) all housing association tenants would get the right to buy, just like council tenants. Ms Alexander was the Minister for Communities, and Professor Maclennan was a special adviser to Donald Dewar’s Lab/LibDem government.

It was 1999, and I was aghast. No-one I knew who worked in housing thought the right to buy was a good idea, and it was hard to understand why someone like Duncan Maclennan would have anything to do with it.

Fast forward 26 years, and I have the answer. Professor Maclennan is the latest guest on the Scottish Housing News Podcast, and of course, I took my chance to ask him what the Government was thinking. He said that ministers wanted all social housing tenants to have the same tenancy rights, including the right to buy.

To my great relief, he also said that he was vehemently opposed to the new right to buy policy, and played his part in modifying the proposals. In the end, far fewer tenants took up their new rights than might otherwise have been the case.

These were interesting times. The Scottish Executive (as it was then known) was promoting a truly radical policy which involved paying off council housing debts in exchange for transferring housing stock to housing associations. There were fears that tenants who transferred to housing associations would lose their right to buy.

In March 2000 Wendy Alexander told the House of Commons Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, “since 700,000 tenants already have the right to buy we do not want to take the right to buy away from them or indeed put off council house tenants from thinking about a stock transfer because they would then believe that one of their core rights or their children’s core rights, the right to buy, would disappear.” The world looks different now.

Professor Maclennan defends the Executive he served, and interestingly, he acknowledges that all the Holyrood governments since have shown greater commitment to social housing than many other nations. But he wants to see a disruption in housing policy; he thinks building much more social housing in the right places would bring economic growth. Housing should be raised to Cabinet level in government, as part of the infrastructure portfolio.

He also wants governments to look at the whole housing market, or housing system, and think about how best to serve people who could afford to house themselves, if house prices and rents were not unrealistically high.

As he points out, the wealth held by so many older people, locked up in homes at inflated prices, is held at the expense of the next generation. Something needs done.

You can hear the Scottish Housing News podcast with Professor Duncan Maclennan here…

Jimmy Black is a City Councillor in Dundee and, until recently, chaired an RSL. He writes in a personal capacity.

The Scottish Housing News Podcast is co-hosted by Kieran Findlay and Jimmy Black. All episodes are available here as well as on the following platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Spotify for Podcasters