Ministers may stop new council houses in England from being sold under the right to buy scheme, Angela Rayner has indicated.
The deputy prime minister said the government would introduce restrictions on new social housing “so we aren’t losing that stock”.
Since it was launched by Margaret Thatcher in 1980, the right to buy scheme has allowed tenants living in council houses to buy them, often at a significant discount.
Successive Conservative prime ministers have extended and encouraged the scheme, which has led to nearly 2m homes being sold.
The policy was praised at first for increasing rates of home ownership among working-class people, but has more recently been blamed for exacerbating homelessness.
Charities and campaigners have called for the scheme to be suspended while more social housing is built.
Rayner told the BBC she did not want more council homes “leaving the system”.
“We’ll be putting restrictions on them so that we aren’t losing those homes … we’re not losing that stock,” she said.
She added that England was facing a “catastrophic emergency situation” in relation to homelessness.
Rayner bought her own home in Stockport under the right to buy scheme in 2007.
The government plans to launch a consultation on the policy this autumn. Labour’s election manifesto committed to “increasing protections on newly built social housing”.
Labour has promised to build 1.5m houses over the course of this parliament, but has not put a figure on social homes.
The right to buy scheme ended in Scotland in 2016 and in Wales in 2019. Since entering office, Labour has said the discount buyers in England can receive will be cut to between £16,000 and £38,000, depending on location.
In the budget, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, announced measures to allow councils to keep all the money they receive from social housing sales, a policy the last Conservative government had followed for two years until March 2024.
In May Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said right to buy should be suspended for new properties and that the policy had caused the city’s housing crisis to get “worse every year”.
In an article for the Guardian, Burnham argued that “there is no honest solution to the housing crisis as long as it stays in its current form”.
“Councils do not have an incentive to fund the building of new homes if they can be sold off cheaply and quickly,” he wrote.
“In the face of a desperate housing crisis, the existence of right to buy means we are in effect trying to refill a bath without being allowed to put the plug back in.”
David Cameron relaunched right to buy during the coalition government in 2012 and increased the discount offered to tenants wanting to buy their council homes.
In 2022, Boris Johnson looked at extending the scheme to tenants who rented their homes from housing associations, but did not proceed with the change.
Rayner’s housing department has previously stressed that it has no plans to abolish the right to buy scheme but that it would be reviewed.
Rayner said in September that she wanted to keep the system in place while making it “fairer” for taxpayers.
She said someone should be allowed to buy the home they have lived in a long time, but that this “has to be levelled against replacing that stock”.
She told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday that she wanted to see “the biggest wave of council housing in a generation and that is what I want to be measured on”.
Housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa has described the right to buy scheme as “the most damaging policy introduced in respect to social housing”.