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Overall, in England, the total number of social housing sales under the Right to Buy
5
was about one third of the cumulative stock of council housing units.

Figure 7. Social housing sales: Annual Right to Buy sales for England: 1980-81 to 2014-15

Source: GOV.UK.

As a consequence, in 2003 household dwellings in the social rented sector dropped
to 12% of household dwellings (see Table 12). The total number of owner-occupants rose
from 12.44 million in 1981 to 18.14 million at its peak in 2003. This trend however, reversed
slightly in the past decade due to declining affordability of homeownership.

Table 12. Dwellings by housing tenure in the UK (%)

Source: GOV.UK.

Yet since 1980, UK property prices have fallen in only seven full years and these
property down-cycles usually coincide with economic recessions (see Figure 8). Most of
these occurred in the recession of the early 1990s and the biggest drop was sustained
in the 2009 Financial Crisis. Though the first surge of Right to Buy sales in the early 1980s
corresponded with a lower rate of increase of house prices (but still an increase); in the
contrary, the second surge of Right to Buy sales in the late 1980s corresponded with the
highest annual increase in house prices the UK had experienced from the period 1980 to
2015.
5. This figure was reached by dividing the number of social housing units sold as of 2015 (1,990,791) by the sum of the num-
ber of social housing units in 1980 (5,068,000) and the number of social housing units built from 1981 to 2015 (951,250).
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