Half a million council tenants to lose the Right to Buy their homes. The Government is to considerably tighten up the eligibility criteria, therefore effectively ending Margaret Thatcher’s revolutionary Right to Buy scheme first seen in the 1980’s. These changes being brought in under Angela Rayner’s overhaul of this scheme will mean half a million tenants will no longer be able to buy their own homes. The Government is proposing to change the discount structure and increase the requirement for tenants to have lived in their homes for between three to over ten years to qualify for the scheme. No one can argue that Right to Buy has been anything other than a great success enabling over two million tenants to become homeowners. Some critics have blamed Right to Buy for causing a shortage of social housing. However, a significant proportion of these former Right to Buy homes have been rented or resold providing homes for thousands of people. The original Government plan at the time was that councils would be able to use the money Right to Buy generated to build replacement homes, but as a result of various rules, restrictions and other pressures on the public purse the money has mostly gone to other areas.