One of Margaret Thatcher's most popular ideas was to sell council houses at a discount to tenants.

It proved such a vote winner that Tony Blair did not dare to dismantle the system when he arrived at the gates of Downing Street five years ago.

Now the Tories, desperate to find new notions that will make them electable once more, are proposing the idea should be extended to housing association tenants.

Meanwhile John Prescott, that symbolic embodiment of Old Labour, has proposed the right to buy should no longer be allowed in some areas of Britain, including Sussex and much of the South-East.

My view, as so often set against the prevailing wisdom, is that right to buy was a disaster for housing, especially in cities such as Brighton and Hove.

The disaster was not unmitigated as the sales did make more people property owners with pride in their homes and broke up some monolithic estates. But its main effects have been malign.

Before the big sale began, Brighton had 13,500 council houses and Hove more than 4,000. Now the combined city has a tad more than 13,000 and numbers are still dwindling.

This is in a city with plenty of poor people and where the proportion of council housing is well below the national average. The homes sold have naturally tended to be the best and biggest.

It leaves the city with a fragmented, awkward and declining housing stock, which will never be replaced because there is almost no room to build social housing any more now the slums have been cleared and most greenfield sites south of the bypass suitable for housing have been swamped by bricks and concrete.

Each time a council home is sold it is lost for ever as social housing. It is fine for the tenant buying it at a price unknown in the commercial market but it deprives homeless people and those on the waiting list of a secure home with a good landlord.

There is also some legalised chicanery going on under the current law. Many relatives of elderly tenants loan them the money to buy homes at maximum discount.

When they die, the homes are either sold for a big profit or let commercially. Firms with similar ideas are advertising in The Argus and tempting tenants into their arms for cash sums which are surprisingly small considering the profits to be made. Surely this is not what Mrs Thatcher intended.

Unlike some Labour opponents of right to buy, who often have several lovely homes of their own, I am in favour of as many people as possible owning their housing either outright or on mortgage.

But in Brighton and Hove in particular and Sussex in general it is crazy to sell council homes to the tenants who live there.

Instead they should be encouraged by financial inducements to buy other homes in the private sector. There are some schemes operating but they are poorly publicised and the incentives are not nearly large enough.

Shared ownership schemes are also a good way for tenants to take their first tenative steps into the private market but they are often feebly and flabbily marketed.

Brighton has been selling council houses since 1952.

Whole estates such as Coldean have been largely privatised since then.

However, in the Fifties, it was considered okay to build onwards and upwards over downland in places such as Hollingbury and Hollingdean.

Now it is not. Although far more conservative with both a large and small C than Brighton, Hove never sold a property until forced to by the Government because it had the most acute shortage of space in Sussex.

It's time to say goodbye to the right to buy in Sussex before any more damage is done.

The Government and all councils have never made housing one of their top priorities because homeless families and those in need are too concerned with surviving to put much pressure on them.

Encouraging tenants to move into the private sector, coupled with a programme of building public rather than private housing, is what is needed.

But we won't get it because it's far too radical and disturbing for those with power and privilege to countenance.