Houses are not cashpoint machines

When Margaret Thatcher created a property-owning democracy, she was credited with cementing the Tories' grip on power.

It's doubtful David Cameron's council house sales will have the same impact.

She shifted no fewer than two million homes. The Coalition Government can't hope to match that.

And while helping tenants into home-ownership is a good way of re-distributing wealth, it won't help young people who can't get onto the housing ladder.

During the 1980s, as she forced local authorities to sell council houses to tenants, and privatised utilities like BT, Mrs Thatcher spread wealth more widely than ever before.

We take it for granted these days but, back then, the "property and share-owning democracy" was highly controversial, to say the least.

Opponents accused Mrs Thatcher of bribing the voters; she said her critics wanted to keep control over people's lives.

Either way, the sale of council houses became less fashionable as time went on.

Tony Blair more or less killed it off when he became Prime Minister by reducing the discounts available to tenants – last year only 4,000 homes were sold.

Now David Cameron is to revive the sale of council and housing association homes by giving tenants discounts of up to £75,000 on the purchase price.

This is three times the maximum discount that has been available in the West Midlands.

Inevitably with any Government scheme, it's surrounded by a mush of bureaucracy. There is no straightforward discount available for everyone.

What you get depends on how long you've been a council or housing association tenant, where you live and whether you're buying a flat or a house.

And, of course, before you start you have to agree the purchase price with the landlord. Even that won't be as simple as it might seem given the ups and downs of the housing market.

Indeed, setting the price for the house could prove a severe trial for many tenants. At the moment, if you ask three estate agents to value a house you will get three very different prices.

That's because, whatever the agents claim, the housing market is still declining.

There was a flurry of activity over the past couple of months but that was only so that first-time buyers with a bit of money could beat the two-year stamp duty holiday which ended on March 24.

The days are long gone when house prices went ever-upwards and gave the impression we were all getting richer and richer by the day.

Estate agents now claim Chancellor George Osborne's seven per cent stamp duty on houses over £2 million will slow things down for everybody.

That's hard to believe but it is a reminder of just how different the housing market is these days from the 1980s when Mrs Thatcher was riding the crest of the property wave.

The hard part for young people is getting hold of a property in the first place.

It's always been difficult scraping together enough money for a deposit and trying to meet the cost of a mortgage out of earnings which are usually pretty modest.

But it's harder now than it's been for years because lenders are demanding much bigger deposits than they used to.

Not long ago – when the banks and building societies were deeply in the grip of their collective madness – they were doling out mortgages for more than a property was worth.

These loans of 110 per cent or 115 per cent of the price of a house were thought affordable because property prices were always rising.

If a buyer got into difficulties, they could always sell up, repay the loan and, quite possibly, trouser a tidy profit at the same time.

That's no longer the case. According to the Land Registry, house prices in the Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin area, for instance, peaked at the end of 2007 when the average price was around £127,000. Today, the average house price in the same area is close to £25,000 lower than that.

That's a huge drop but it's the same story almost everywhere in the West Midlands.

Clearly, this is not a boom time for home-buying. The figures may make some people wonder whether, for social housing tenants or first-time buyers, home-ownership is all it's cracked up to be.

The Government's NewBuy scheme, which provides guarantees on 95 per cent mortgages for first-time buyers, is only just getting off the starting blocks.

If it works, it should help to rescue some young people from living at home with their parents for years to come as they save up for a huge deposit on their own house.

There certainly won't be much of a revival of the housing market until it's much easier for first-time buyers to get a foot on the ladder.

So if you are thinking of buying your council house, please note there is no easy money to be made from any property these days.

But there's an up-side – we have to look on houses as places to live in rather than cashpoint machines.

It's a much more sensible approach even if it does condemn many of us to D-I-Y chores all over Easter.