CONSERVATIVE plans to extend Margaret Thatcher’s right to buy represent a new multibillion-pound raid on public housing, trade unions and housing campaigners warned yesterday.

Unveiled in the Tory manifesto, the renewed scheme aims to give 1.3 million housing association tenants the right to buy their home at huge discounts of up to £77,000 or £102,700 in London.

But unions predict the plan will end up seeing property magnates and private landlords getting their grubby hands on the housing association homes.

Defend Council Housing’s Eileen Short told the Star that the housing market was “utterly failing to provide housing people can afford and it is creating the highest level of evictions, the lowest level of house building and the highest level of income spent on rents since records began.

“And the Tories decide this is the moment to throw the rest of housing associations’ council homes onto the bonfire. The last remaining quality council homes will be lost.”

Thatcher’s original right to buy led to hundreds of thousands of tenanted council homes being bought by their occupiers or private landlords.

But profiteering individuals and firms bought the houses as tenants sold up and moved on, leading to the loss of 40 per cent of Britain’s council housing.

New analysis by general union GMB has revealed that of 4.2 million households living in private rented accommodation in Britain, 1.6 million are paid for in part or in full by taxpayer-funded housing benefit at a cost of £9.3 billion last year.

Now council houses taken over by housing associations will be sold if the Tories retain power on May 7.

Homes will be sold at discounted prices, again subsidised by taxpayers.

Construction union Ucatt said that for every 11 homes sold only one new one was being built.

Even Tory mayor and Prime Minister David Cameron’s fellow Bullingdon boy Boris Johnson slammed the plan as “extremely costly” given the massive subsidies involved.

Labour shadow housing minister Emma Reynolds added: “This is yet another uncosted, unfunded and unbelievable announcement from the Tories.”