People living in former council homes are being asked if they want to sell them back to the local authority.

Letters have been sent out by Hillingdon Council in recent weeks to occupants of properties whose leases were sold under the ‘right-to-buy’ scheme of the 1980s. Rental deals are also on offer, to people who want to work ‘in partnership with the council’ and lease back.

The letter points out the attraction of doing business with the authority: no agency fees and the fact you would be ‘dealing with a reputable organisation’.

It directs the recipient to a page on the Hillingdon Council website where an application form is available. The deadline is July 1.

Like many councils, especially in London, Hillingdon suffers from a shortage of properties.

Two- and three-bedroom homes are particularly in demand, as the effects of central Government’s ‘bedroom tax’ are felt.

It was the 1980 Housing Act which brought in a ‘right to buy’, although council house sales had been legal, if rare, before that.

Leases of typically 125 years were offered, and it is estimated one-in-three occupants took up the right to buy.

Chris Summers, Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, above, said: “While I welcome the council’s efforts to increase its housing stock by buying back leasehold properties, it just goes to show that the right-to-buy policy which was Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policy in the 1980s was short-sighted and dogmatic.

“It has led to a situation where councils across London are so short of housing that they are having to pay often exorbitant sums to private landlords to house people on the housing waiting list in flats and houses which once belonged to the councils themselves.

“It is extremely interesting that Tory-run Hillingdon Council have been sending out letters – some of them on the very eve of the recent local elections – to leaseholders seeking to quietly buy back the leases of former council properties.

“This is a council which – unlike Labour-run Ealing Council next door – has built virtually no social housing in the last four years and has simply farmed out homeless people to the private sector.”

cllr philip corthorne COR hillingdon councillor

Councillor Philip Corthorne, above, Hillingdon’s cabinet member for housing, refuted this suggestion, however.

“We are one of the few local authorities which has developed its own housing revenue account building fund, so it’s inaccurate to say that we have not been doing any building,” he said.

Councillor Corthorne said the council had earmarked £2m for acquisitions - enough for about 15 dwellings - as a part of a wider housing strategy that included private sector, housing association and new build provision.

He said the council’s policy was to procure, where it could, the size of property required.

“It would make sense to look at it,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you, really?”

Alan Clark, the secretary of Hillingdon Leaseholders’ Association, which represents about 300 of the borough’s 3,000 leasehold properties, said he had not witnessed a such an offer for ‘about 15 to 20 years’.

“My own view is that they must be terribly short of council housing, and there is either not enough money or not enough houses,” he said.

“This is the first time this has been introduced for a long, long time.”

He said the council was as good a purchaser as anyone if it came to selling your lease, but he was not so sure about having it as a tenant.

“Personally, I’m not 100 per cent happy with their record on leasing because they promise to return the property in good condition, but I know of a lot of people who have had to do a lot of work to put the property right,” he said.

Defending the fundamentals of the right-to-buy policy of the Thatcher era, Councillor Corthorne said it had helped many people who would otherwise never have been able to own a home to get on to the housing ladder.

He said Hillingdon has now taken advantage of recent rule changes, to usher in fixed-term tenancies that allow for lease breaks after five years if tenants’ circumstances change, to help deal with the strictures of the bedroom tax.

“We are facing some acute challenges but we think the approach is right,” he said

Will you offer the council your property? If not, why not? Message as via www.getwestlondon.co.uk/buy-sell-tell or go to our Facebook page, www,facebook.com/uxbridgegazette