Tenants of Chorley Community Housing who were tenants of Chorley Borough Council at the time of the Large Scale Voluntary Transfer to CCH in 2007 (and their tenancy successors) have the Preserved Right to Buy.

The Preserved Right to Buy provides a discount to CCH tenants to enable them to buy their current home.

Some properties, such as sheltered housing, are excluded from the Preserved Right to Buy scheme.

The Preserved Right to Buy entitles those eligible CCH tenants to a discount on the puchase price of their home based on the number of years they have spent as a council or housing association tenant.  The purchase price is determined by the market value of the property less the discount (based on years as a council or housing association tenant) to which the tenant is entitled as shown in the table below.  The maximum discount in Chorley is limited to £75,000.

When calculating the purchase price and the amount of discount, CCH take into acount the money that has been spent on buying, building, repairing and improving the property during the last 15 years.

If you sell a Preserved Right to Buy home within five years of owning it, you’ll have to pay back any discount that you got. You’ll have to pay back:

• all of the discount in the first year
• Four fifths of the discount in the second year
• Three fifths of the discount in the third year
• Two fifths of the discount in the fourth year
• One fifth of the discount in the fifth year

After five years, you can sell without repaying any discount.

In addition to this, if you sell within five years you will also have to pay back a percentage of the resale value of the property, disregarding the value of any improvements. For example, if your home was valued at £100,000 at the time you bought it, and you received a discount of £20,000, that means that your discount was 20 per cent.

If your home is valued at £150,000 when you wish to sell it, and you want to sell within the second year of purchase, you will have to repay £150,000 x 20 per cent discount x 4/5 i.e. £24,000.

You may not have to pay back the discount if you transfer ownership of your home to a member of your family. You will need to agree this first with CCH and then get a solicitor to do this for you.

To begin the process contact us and ask for a Right to Buy claim form (Form RTB1) or download a copy of the form from the government's Directgov website. (Be wary of other people offering you forms, especially if they ask you to pay them for this.) 

For more detail about how Right to Buy works, please visit the government's DirectGov website.

All tenants of Chorley Community Housing who live in a property that was transferred to CCH in 2007 by Large Scale Voluntary Transfer from Chorley Council have the Right to Acquire.

The Right to Acquire cannot be used in conjunction with the Preserved Right to Buy.  It is normally less generous than the Preserved Right to Buy Scheme.