Right to buy in reverse: how Brighton is acting on its housing crisis

On a windswept housing estate by the Channel, Jacob Taylor surveyed the latest addition to his property empire: a mixture of one-, two and three-bedroom flats, built on the playing fields of an old private school.

- Richard Partington

They might not look like much but these neat rows of redbrick homes are an important acquisition - not for an offshore investor or a real-estate mogul, but for the Labour-run Brighton and Hove city council, where Taylor, one of its deputy leaders, is taking a trailblazing approach.

"We are essentially rapidly buying properties from private landlords," he said, walking through the plot in the Sussex village of Rottingdean, where Rudyard Kipling once lived.

In a plan agreed this month, the council is spending £50m to acquire 200 homes over the next two years, with the aim of replenishing its heavily depleted stock of social homes and temporary accommodation.

This is right to buy in reverse. Taking chunks of private property into public hands, Taylor aims to tackle a worsening homelessness crisis in the seaside city, where as many as 10 more people are sleeping rough every week.

"The housing crisis is so bad in Brighton. We have near-London house prices but don't have London wages," he said. "It's actually been getting worse in the last year, not better.

"You can't [over]estimate the impact it's having on people. As yet, I haven't got enough homes versus the demand."

Other councils, and the government, should take note. Housing shortages, rising rents, and the cost to local authorities of housing families in temporary accommodation - funnelling public money into the pockets of private landlords - are a massive national problem. In this all-encompassing economic and social crisis, Brighton is a microcosm.