This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.
The focus of attention this week has been the Chancellor’s spending review. With regard to housing, the Deputy Prime Minister’s department was promised £39bn over ten years for social and affordable housing in England. On the face of it, a boost to Angela Rayner’s plans to build 1,5 million homes in the lifetime of this parliament.
Here’s what David Coleman, Emeritus professor of demography at Oxford University, (whose population projections in 2010 suggested the White British would become a minority in about 2066) wrote in a letter to The Times (13 June) about the government’s plans:
“The housing announcements in the spending review, and the target of 1.5 million homes in this parliament, do not reflect the needs of the resident population but instead arise in large part from the inflation of demand by those arriving from overseas. The 2021 census indicated that 79 per cent of additional households formed since 2011 were headed by people born abroad. Migration in the four years 2021-24 alone amounted to 2.3 million people, or about one million extra households needing shelter. Put another way, migration even at the much lower annual level of 320,000 implies about 700,000 additional households from migration by Labour’s target date, almost half the intended housing increase. To that degree the government is running an international housing policy.”
In other words, half the 1.5 million homes to be built are already needed for those who’ve arrived in the last four years and the bulk of the rest will go to those still to come – and that’s assuming net migration continues to fall to around an annual 320,000 from 2029 as the ONS expects. Don’t forget, according to Centre for Cities, we are already 4.3 million homes short.
Any wonder that hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way here both legally and illegally? Here is a table illustrating the growing number of asylum applications now even higher than they were 20 years ago following the fallout from the Balkan wars.
Of course, the result is more and more costs being piled onto the British taxpayer. One of the most egregious ways the government spends our money is on hotels for asylum seekers who have illegally crossed the Channel. Again, this is a powerful incentive – knowing that when you arrive in Britain you will immediately be given accommodation, potentially for years. Migration Observatory has projected this is an implied subsidy of £133 per migrant per night, or £3 billion in 2023/24.
One might think that removing the subsidy would remove an incentive. But the Chancellor isn’t promising to remove it; instead, she has made a vague commitment to move asylum seekers into properties rented from the private sector. In other plans hinted at by the government, it seems the Home Office is now contemplating buying hotels to accommodate asylum seekers. Presumably, so that they can argue that they have kept to their promise of moving asylum seekers out of hotels. What a sham.
This is a preview of Migration Watch’s free weekly newsletter. Please consider signing up to the newsletter directly, you can do so here and will receive an email copy of the newsletter every week as soon as it is released.