ALMOST 40 per cent of council homes sold via “right to buy” are now being let by private landlords who are making a killing, according to Inside Housing magazine’s research published yesterday.

A total of 127,762 homes were flogged to tenants at huge discounts, Freedom of Information (FoI) requests sent to 91 local authorities reveal.

Nearly 48,000 — 38 per cent — of these property owners are registered at other addresses, suggesting that they are profiting from the ex-council homes by receiving market-level rents.

And the estate agents have been crowing over the sale of a £1.2 million three-bedroom property in Covent Garden, central London, this week. The flat was bought for just £130,000 in 1990.

As an example of how the local authority sell-off has been exploited, Stephen Gow, son of Margaret Thatcher’s housing minister Ian Gow, owns more than 40 former council flats in Westminster alone.

Eileen Short of Defend Council Housing said: “This is what happens if you try to turn all our housing into a marketplace. The richest people buy up the most and make a killing.

“These landlords are charging often-exorbitant rents so high that many need housing benefit to pay for them in another back-door subsidy to these landlords.

“They pocket millions buying homes built and paid for by tenants and the money from sales is not invested to build replacement homes but siphoned off by government and spent elsewhere.”

2015’s Tories, keen to follow in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher, who introduced right to buy in 1980, have pledged to extend the policy to housing association (HA) tenants.

Councils have warned against the extension because they will be forced to sell their most expensive properties as they become vacant to make up the shortfall owed to private charity HAs.

Tom Chance, the Green Party’s housing spokesman, said: “We need more social housing, not less, and for them to be treated as a place to live rather than as an investment.”