Wiltshire's right to build council houses but tenants' right to buy is wrong

IT pains me to admit it, but Wiltshire Council is doing something right for once.
Investing £70million (OK, some of the funding isn’t confirmed yet, but the intention is there) in much-needed houses for hard-up young families to rent and in flats to enable the elderly to downsize is exactly what’s needed.
If it encourages the construction industry to get on and develop all that land it’s sitting on, so much the better.
A building boom on designated sites, preferably brownfield, will give the council ammunition to fight off speculative applications elsewhere and protect our countryside.
So far, then, so unusually positive.
It’s a particularly remarkable turn of events when you realise that the only council housing in the county right now is what used to belong to the old Salisbury District.
The other parts of Wiltshire handed theirs over to housing associations long ago, and as I recall from the mutterings at the time, the Trowbridge generals weren’t over-keen on becoming social landlords when they first staged their bloodless coup.
So I’d say well done, and particularly to housing portfolio holder, cllr Richard Clewer.
He’s not a cabinet member because he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, i.e. south of the Plain, but he’s doing a good job.
And as Groucho Marx more or less said, who’d want to be a member of that club anyway?
However (and there always is a however, isn’t there?) something lurking just outside the spotlight bothers me, and that’s the right to buy.
Once a family have lived in one of these new homes for five years they’ll have the right to acquire it at a discount. Then it won’t be a council house any more.
So what will be available for equally deserving young couples who come along later?
Or are we committing as a county to repeating the whole exercise, and to a long-term strategy of subsidising cheap property purchases for the lucky few?
Meanwhile those who are just as hard-up but can’t get a council house in the first place and have to rent privately won’t have a hope in hell of being able to afford to buy their home on the private market.
Or am I missing something?
We all know what Mrs Thatcher’s political reasons were for wanting to create a society of home owners, but in today’s economic climate that’s about as likely to happen as me being appointed special adviser on public relations to Jane Scott.
The right to buy isn’t Wiltshire’s fault, of course. The only people who can overturn it are our elected representatives at Westminster.