I WAS dismayed and disappointed to hear of the plans in the Conservative manifesto to extend the Right to Buy (RTB) to housing association tenants.

I fully support the aspiration of home ownership but extending Right to Buy is the wrong solution to our housing crisis.

Our housing crisis is due to a lack of homes; following 40 years of successive governments’ failure to build enough.

We need to build more, not just change the tenure of those that exist.

While extending Right to Buy will see some people being able to buy their own home with help from the taxpayer.

These are people already living in good secure homes on some of the country’s cheapest rents.

It’s unjust because it won’t help the millions of people in private rented homes who are desperate to buy but have no hope of doing so.

Nor will it help the three million adult children living with their parents because they can’t afford to rent or buy.

To use public assets to gift more than £100,000 to someone already living in a good quality home is deeply unfair.

Peaks & Plains Housing Trust is a registered charity, and required by the Charity Commission to protect our assets for long term beneficiaries.

How do we square that legal duty with this proposal?

As private sector, independent bodies, what precedent does this policy set about the sequestration of assets or the re-categorisation of our existing private borrowing as new public sector debt?

Cheshire East Council no longer owns any housing stock.

Therefore, how can they meet the proposal’s fundamental requirement to sell off their highest valued stock to fund the RTB discounts?

Finally we are promised one-to-one replacement housing for every one sold off. The government made the same promise in 2012, since when 26,000 homes have been sold and a rather meagre 2,712 homes built to replace them.

This is the wrong solution to the housing crisis in Cheshire East.

We need more homes for those who are priced out of the market; not fewer.

Tim Pinder Chief executive Peaks & Plains Housing Trust