Kent Right to Buy: Eligible Sales Jump 143% After Discount Cuts

MHCLG’s newest figures record 192 eligible sales classed as Right to Buy across Kent’s seven council landlords in 2025/26, against 79 a year earlier. Four east Kent councils account for more than four-fifths of the increase. Millions of pounds changed hands too — but the figures come with an important warning about what they do, and don’t, measure.

There was a rather expensive deadline hanging over council tenants in autumn 2024.

Get a Right to Buy application in before 21 November and, outside London, the maximum cash discount could still reach £102,400. Apply after the rules changed and the maximum available in the South East fell to £38,000. Tenants noticed. Across England, applications rocketed from 18,755 in 2023/24 to 63,378 in 2024/25 — up 238%. MHCLG says some homes finally sold during 2025/26 are likely to have come from that pre-cut queue.

The deadline did what deadlines tend to do. It created a rush.

England’s councils subsequently reported 14,275 “eligible sales” in 2025/26, 90% more than the previous year and the highest number since 2006/07. Those sales produced £1.61 billion in receipts. Of them, 14,187 were specifically classed as Right to Buy.

Kent followed the same direction, only rather more dramatically.

Our analysis of MHCLG’s newly updated Pooling of Capital Receipts data finds 192 eligible sales classed as Right to Buy across Kent’s seven council landlords in 2025/26. The comparable figure for 2024/25 was 79. That’s 113 more sales, or an increase of about 143%.

The striking bit isn’t merely the county-wide jump. Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe and Thanet together went from 30 eligible RTB-classified sales to 122. Those four east Kent councils therefore account for 92 of Kent’s 113 additional sales — 81.4% of the whole increase.

Canterbury alone rises from eight to 54. Dover goes from 14 to 35. Folkestone & Hythe more than doubles, from seven to 17. Thanet moves from one to 16. Calling that last movement a 1,500% rise would be mathematically sound but journalistically daft: the starting point was one. The useful fact is that another 15 eligible sales appear in the return.

That concentration raises a better question. Why was the surge so pronounced in east Kent? Was it simply the number of applications already lodged before the discount was slashed, or did house prices, tenant circumstances and the size and make-up of individual councils’ housing stock play a part?

The published figures don’t tell us.

Follow the money

The homes are only half the story. There’s the money too.

Nationally, eligible sales generated £1.61 billion during 2025/26, almost double the previous year. The average receipt was £112,900 per dwelling. A receipt isn’t the house’s full market value: it’s broadly the money arising from the sale after the Right to Buy discount and subject to the capital-receipts rules governing what councils can retain and use.

Kent’s council accounts show how substantial those flows became. Ashford records £4.425m from Right to Buy sales. Canterbury records £6.863m from dwelling sales, net of administration costs, alongside 54 Right to Buy sales and one auction sale. Dartford records £4.065m from HRA dwelling-sale receipts, while Dover records £6.735m from dwelling sales. Those four accounting lines alone total £22.088m.

But we’re not calling £22.088m “Kent’s Right to Buy receipts”, because that would pretend the councils have reported precisely the same thing on precisely the same accounting basis. They haven’t. Canterbury’s figure, for example, sits alongside an auction sale and is net of administration costs. MHCLG’s common-basis receipt table is the proper dataset for county-wide comparison.

Folkestone & Hythe illustrates why that caution matters. Its Housing Revenue Account records £1.072m of “Houses and Flats” capital receipts in 2025/26 — curiously, exactly the same amount shown for 2024/25 — while another note records £3.006m of HRA non-current asset sale proceeds transferred to the Capital Receipts Reserve. With 17 sales appearing in the stock movement, those figures need reconciling before anybody casually labels £1.072m the council’s definitive Right to Buy proceeds.

The figures aren’t the final sales total

There’s another trap.

Kent County Council’s definitive 2024/25 bulletin records 88 actual Right to Buy sales across Kent’s seven council landlords. The comparable MHCLG pooling return we’ve analysed contains 79 eligible sales classed as Right to Buy. That nine-sale difference matters.

We can see the same issue emerging in 2025/26. Dartford’s accounts record 27 actual Right to Buy sales, against 24 in the pooling dataset. Dover’s accounts record 36, against 35. MHCLG itself calls the Pooling of Capital Receipts return a leading indicator, because not every conceivable Right to Buy transaction is captured by it and a small number of other eligible sale types can appear. The definitive 2025/26 council-by-council Right to Buy totals aren’t due until 2027.

So 192 is an important number. It just isn’t a magic one.

What about Kent’s other councils?

Seven Kent districts retain their own council housing stock: Ashford, Canterbury, Dartford, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe, Gravesham and Thanet. Those are the seven directly comparable council landlords in the Right to Buy data.

Maidstone, Sevenoaks, Swale, Tonbridge & Malling and Tunbridge Wells don’t have comparable council-owned housing stock in this series. That doesn’t mean Right to Buy has vanished entirely there: qualifying tenants whose homes were transferred from councils to registered providers can retain a Preserved Right to Buy. KCC itself isn’t an HRA council landlord, while Medway is a separate unitary authority and isn’t included in Kent Analytics’ county definition.Selling is quick. Replacing isn’t

Nationally, the 14,275 eligible sales sit alongside 3,452 replacement homes reported as started or acquired using Right to Buy receipts, 7% fewer than the year before.

Don’t subtract one from the other.

Councils have several years in which to use relevant receipts, meaning a home acquired in 2025/26 may have been financed by a sale made years earlier. And 55% of the 3,452 replacements were acquisitions of existing homes rather than new-build starts. Buying an existing property may add a home to council ownership, but it doesn’t add another house to England’s overall stock.

Folkestone & Hythe again makes the point nicely. Its HRA stock rose from 3,398 to 3,404 homes during 2025/26: 20 acquisitions, 17 sales and one addition through change of use. That’s a net gain of six homes. It still doesn’t follow that the 20 acquisitions “replaced” those 17 particular sales, because the financing timetable crosses financial years.

We’ve been here before

In March, The Shepway Vox Team traced Right to Buy across Kent back to 1980. Our analysis found 37,464 homes sold through the scheme by March 2025, against an original 1979/80 council-stock baseline of 100,708 homes. For plenty of tenants, buying the family home was life-changing. For councils trying to house people now, the accumulated loss of public housing matters just as much.

What Kent’s seven council landlords should now publish is straightforward: how many 2025/26 completions came from applications lodged before 21 November 2024; the market value and discount attached to each sale; the receipts retained; the bedroom sizes and wards involved; what those receipts have funded; and the actual net movement in council housing stock.

The discount deadline explains the queue.

It doesn’t tell us what Kent got back after the keys changed hands.

Have a story that needs telling, or information you think may interest us? Please get in touch. All correspondence will be treated in the strictest confidence TheShepwayVoxTeam@proton.me

The Shepway Vox Team
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