A FORMER Dudley Council tenant bought their home under Right to Buy for just over £53,000 and sold it on for more than double the price five months later, an investigation has found.

The tenant turned homeowner sold the property for £118,000 in June 2017 - having bought it from the local authority for £53,100 in December 2016, a price difference of almost £65,000 - yielding a £382 profit a day, HM Land Registry figures analysed by the BBC's Shared Data Unit have revealed.

According to the figures, which were published in Freedom of Information responses, there were 421 council homes sold under the Right to Buy scheme in the Dudley borough between the year 2000 and April 2018.

Former council tenants, on average, each made real term profits of £33,580 (around £17 a day) from selling their homes during the 18-year period, while Right to Buy owners typically hung onto their properties for an average six years and nine months - the investigation showed.

Out of the total 421 sales, recorded in the borough during the 18-years, nearly 100 tenants sold their homes for more than £50,000 more than they paid for them.

One bought a property for £36,000 in November 2012 and sold it exactly five years later for £143,000 - a price difference of £107,000 (a profit of £58 a day).

One buyer in Dudley also bought and sold their council property within 15 days in 2016. The home was purchased on April 13 and sold on April 28 that same year for £91,000 - although the data does not reveal the original price paid for the property.

The investigation found homeowners in Britain who bought under the scheme made £6.4billion in collective profit from sales since 2000.

In Dudley, according to the available data, former tenants collectively made £8.7million in real terms when they sold their ex-council homes for a total of £41.7million between 2000 and April 2018 (collective profits of £7,172 per day).

In Sandwell 478 sales were recorded in Sandwell between 2000 and April 2018. Of those sales 56 saw properties sold for more than £50,000 than former tenants paid for them.

The biggest price difference was on a property that was bought for £19,980 in 2002 under Right to Buy and sold for £148,000 in 2007 - a difference of £128,020 (£81 profit a day).

Another property was bought on August 16, 2006, for £52,000 and sold just three months later on December 11 that same year for £90,000 – a profit of £38,000 (£325 profit a day).

At the opposite end of the spectrum – some losses were made. One property was bought in September 2006 for £150,000 and sold six years later in October 2012 for £112,000 – £38,000 less, equating to a loss of £17 a day.

Average profits by those who used the Right to Buy scheme were £26,244 each in real terms.

Some 2.6 million council homes have been sold across Great Britain since the Right to Buy policy came into effect in October 1980 - enabling council tenants to buy their homes at a discount.

Those who sold within five years of purchasing would have had to repay the discount on a sliding scale depending how long they kept their home - but the discounts repaid were not recorded in the data used for this analysis - and former tenants who sold within the first 10 years of buying homes had to offer their council the chance to buy back the property first.

Late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said when it was introduced that Right to Buy would pave the way for a "property-owning democracy" and supporters of the scheme say it has helped people to secure their financial futures.

Minister of State for Housing, Kit Malthouse MP, said: "Under Right to Buy, the government has helped nearly two million people achieve their dream of home ownership and we are working hard to make sure that everyone in the country who wants it has a shot at getting on the housing ladder.

“Tenants who use Right to Buy must repay some of their discount back to their council if they sell the property within the first five years, and must offer their local authority the opportunity to buy it back.”

Critics of the scheme, however, say too many people have profited from a policy that had "much bigger social ambitions".

A spokesman for the Chartered Institute for Housing said: “We think the time is right to suspend it (in England) to stem the loss of homes for social rent – which are often the only genuinely affordable option for people on lower incomes. Not only are we failing to build enough homes for social rent – right to buy means we are losing them at a time when millions of people need genuinely affordable housing more than ever."

Polly Neate, chief executive of Shelter, the housing and anti-homelessness charity, added: “While Right-to-Buy has helped some people to get on the property ladder who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to, it’s stored up serious trouble for the future because we’re still building far fewer homes than we’re selling off.

“The chronic shortage of social housing available is nothing short of a disaster given our current housing emergency."

At time of publishing Dudley and Sandwell councils had not commented on the investigation.