Why Right to Buy could be very wrong

The government is lauding the new-look Right to Buy scheme. But there's one major problem with it that could land buyers in hot water. It assumes house prices will never fall.

"Property asking prices hit record high" claimed a story all over the internet on Monday. It's a headline government ministers must have looked at with some satisfaction. Why? Because it shows that the plan is working.

The plan is to do everything possible to make house prices around the UK to look, on average, as though they aren't falling in nominal terms, and so to stop the UK economy utterly imploding.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.