Angela Rayner is weighing up bringing Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme to an end - despite using it to buy her own home, it has emerged.

Rayner - both the Deputy PM and Housing Secretary - had held "urgent" talks with local authorities in August on housing reforms, and now more than 100 councils have come forward to urge her to repeal Right to Buy.

In a report published just yesterday, London's Southwark Council accused the scheme of contributing to a £2.2billion shortfall in local authority accounts.

The council, which houses more than 1,500 asylum seekers, also claimed Right to Buy was worsening Britain's housing crisis, and had presented "a serious problem for the sustainability of England's council housing".

The Telegraph, which revealed Rayner's plan, was told by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government that it was "working at pace to reverse the continued decline in the number of social rent homes".

That "continued decline" refers to damning statistics across the last financial year in which 10,896 homes were sold through Right to Buy - but a mere 3,447 were replaced, leaving Britain with a net loss of 7,449.

The Thatcher-era scheme lets council tenants buy their homes off their local authorities for a discount of up to 70 per cent.

Since 1991, it has led to a net loss of 24,000 social homes - one being Rayner's own, which she snapped up from Stockport Council for £79,000 in 2007 - a 25 per cent discount, leaving her nearly £49,000 better off.

Shadow housing secretary, Kemi Badenoch, said it was "no coincidence" that Labour "wants to destroy one of Margaret Thatcher's most transformative policies".

"If Angela Rayner was serious about improving people's lives, she would be finding ways to increase house-building, rather than cutting a programme that gets people on the housing ladder and gives them a stake in their communities."

Welcome back to GB News' Politics LIVE blog.

We'll be updating this page throughout the day with live politics updates as they come in.