Title: Right to Buy
Content:  The Right to Buy scheme is a policy in the United Kingdom (with the exception of Scotland since 1 August 2016 and Wales from 26 January 2019) which gives secure tenants of councils and some housing associations the legal right to buy, at a large discount, the council house they are living in. There is also a Right to Acquire for assured tenants of housing association dwellings built with public subsidy after 1997, at a smaller discount. By 1997 over 1,700,000 dwellings in the UK had been sold under the scheme since its introduction in 1980, with the scheme being cited as one of the major factors in the drastic reduction in the amount of social housing in 
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  In the summer of 2017, the Welsh Government proposed a law to abolish Right to Buy in Wales. This law was passed by the Welsh Assembly in December 2017, and the scheme ended on 26 January 2019.
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  After Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in May 1979, the legislation to implement the Right to Buy was passed in the Housing Act 1980. Michael Heseltine, in his role as Secretary of State for the Environment, was in charge of implementing the legislation. Some 6,000,000 people were affected; about one in three actually purchased their housing unit. Heseltine noted that "no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people". He said the right to buy had two main objectives: to give people what they wanted and to reverse the trend of ever-increasing dominance of the state over the life of the 
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  In July 2013, the Scottish Government confirmed that Right to Buy would be abolished in Scotland from 2017. It was in the end abolished as a part of the Housing (Scotland) Act 2014 from 1 August 2016.
Title: Public housing in the United Kingdom
Content:  Laws restricted councils' investment in housing, preventing them subsidising it from local taxes, but more importantly, council tenants were given the Right to Buy in the Housing Act 1980 offering a discount price on their council house. Proposed as policy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and carried out under the remit of Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine, the Right To Buy scheme allowed tenants to buy their home with a discount of 33–50% off the market value, depending on the time they had lived there. Councils were prevented from reinvesting the proceeds of these sales in new housing, and 
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  Local authorities had had the ability to sell council houses to their tenants since the Housing Act 1936, but until the early 1970s such sales were limited: between 1957 and 1964, some 16,000 council houses were sold in England. The Labour Party initially proposed the idea of the right of tenants to own the house they live in, in their manifesto for the 1959 general election, which they lost. In 1968 a circular was issued limiting sales in cities but was withdrawn by an incoming Conservative government in 1970. The Conservative Greater London Council (GLC) in the late 1960s was persuaded by Horace Cutler, its Chairman of Housing, to create a general sales scheme. Cutler disagreed with the principle of local authorities being providers of housing, and 
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  of homes sold under Right to Buy in London (52,000 homes) were being rented by councils from private landlords, leading to criticisms that the scheme "represents incredibly poor value for money to taxpayers" since it "helped to fuel the increase in the housing benefit bill, heaped more pressure on local authority waiting lists and led to more Londoners being forced into the under-regulated private rented sector". A survey in 2013 showed around one third of Right to Buy houses were now owned by private landlords, while the son of the late Ian Gow (Thatcher's housing minister) owned some 40 houses. 
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  governed and regulated most types of mortgage selling. The FCA's governance of Right to Buy purchases was partly to solve the widespread problem of Right to Buy mis-selling from brokers and solicitors alike. They all had their own agendas, and many were charging excessive fees that were then taken out of their client's discount. The above actions that have been taken coupled with the end of the boom period seem to have brought this problem under control. In 2009, the Localis think tank suggested, as part of a review of principles for social housing reform, that the right to buy should be extended into equity slivers, which could be part-earned through being a good tenant. The qualifying period changed from 5 years to 3 years in 2018.
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  take-up; the maximum discount was raised to 60% in 1984 and 70% in 1986. By 1988, the average discount that had by then actually been given was 44%. The local authority was obliged to offer a mortgage with no deposit. The discount depended on how long tenants had been living in the house, with the proviso that if they subsequently sold their house within a minimum period they would have to pay back a proportion of the discount. The policy became one of the major points of Thatcherism. The policy proved immediately popular. Some local Labour-controlled councils were opposed, but the legislation prevented them from blocking purchases and enabled them to redeem 
Title: Right to Buy
Content:  1987, more than 1,000,000 council houses in the UK had been sold to their tenants, although the number of council houses purchased by tenants declined during the 1990s. The Labour Party was initially against the sales and pledged to oppose them at the 1983 general election but dropped its official opposition to the scheme in 1985. However, at the 1987 general election, the Conservative government warned voters that a Labour government would still abolish the scheme. When Labour returned to power at the 1997 general election, it reduced the discount available to tenants in local authorities which had severe pressure on their housing stock; this included almost the whole of London.

Question: when did the right to buy scheme start?
Answer: 1980.