Times were very different when I got my first mortgage. Young people may find this hard to believe but I was a home owner at the age of 19.

I sometimes drive past my very first house and wonder how much it would cost to buy today in comparison to the £5,850 I paid for it way back when in the 1970s.

For the record, that figure isn’t a typographical error but by the same token, my weekly wages at the time would today barely pay for a couple of pints of craft beer. And we also had to contend with double digit interest rates.

But yes, I will readily concede I was fortunate to get on the housing ladder at a time before house prices exploded and mortgage lenders were looking for a sensible multiple of earnings before they would stump up the cash.

And there were other things to take into consideration. Back in the day, there was plenty of public sector rented accommodation. I actually lived in a council house until I moved out when I bought my home. Despite all that, I still believe home ownership is something to be aspired to for many.

My parents never had any desire to be home owners, however, and neither did most of the people they knew. Their council house rent was affordable, the houses were basic but well maintained by the council and there just wasn’t an impetus to take on the responsibility of owning their own homes.

And then along came Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and her Right to Buy scheme. At the time, It seemed like a miracle of social engineering. It was possible in part because we had plenty of what is now known as social housing. There were 5.5m homes provided by local authorities and housing associations in England and that accounted for 31 per cent of the total stock.

Under Right to Buy, anyone who had lived in council housing for more than three years was entitled to own it. Tenants were given a 33 per cent discount on market value at the three-year point, rising to 50 per cent after 20 years, up to a ceiling of £50,000. And they were guaranteed 100 per cent mortgages by the local authority. This was a staggeringly good deal for anyone who was able to take advantage of it.

But we always have to be aware of the law of unintended consequences. According to the guardian.co.uk, in the 42 years since the scheme was introduced, fewer than five per cent of the homes sold off have been replaced and the available social housing stock has dropped from that 5.5m figure to 4.2m by 2020.

And worse, a large proportion of Right to Buy homes are now in the hands of private landlords. In 2017, Inside Housing magazine reported that 40 per cent of them were being rented out, and their tenants were paying more than twice the rent charged by local authorities. Average property prices in Britain have gone from that 1980 figure of £23,500 to £278,436 as of March.

So has the policy been successful? Certainly yes for some, less so for those who need good quality social housing who now have far less choice because of the failure to replace sold-off council houses.

And yet prime minister Boris Johnson now wants to extend the scheme to take in housing association properties.

It’s not a new idea. A version appeared in David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto, only to be discarded as unworkable after an unsuccessful pilot in the West Midlands, which found that nothing like enough of the properties being sold off were being replaced.

Don’t forget, these homes are sold at a massive discount but the cost of replacing them is at full price so who is going to fund the difference?

But for an embattled prime minister, announcing a policy that harks back to Thatcherism is the kind of empty words devoid of costings, planning and detail we have come to expect.

Maybe we will have one or two pilot schemes to test Johnson’s version of the scheme. But to be honest, it has already proven to be unworkable, unwanted and too costly and my expectation is it will be quietly be allowed to fade away.