Cameron Pins Election on Promise of Million New Homeowners
Anyone who has rented a property for at least three years will be entitled to buy it at a discount. The housing association will be required to build a new home to replace each one it sells off.
Photographer: Jason Alden/BloombergU.K. Prime Minister David Cameron pinned his Conservative Party’s hopes of re-election on offering 1.3 million poorer families the chance to buy their own homes.
With less than four weeks to go until the May 7 vote and the polls still neck-and-neck, Cameron is reviving one of Margaret Thatcher’s most popular policies, the sale of houses owned by local councils to tenants at discounts of at least a third. In the Tories’ election manifesto published Tuesday, he pledged to extend the policy to cover the nonprofit housing associations that are some of Britain’s biggest landlords.