Migration Watch UK
August 17, 2011
The social housing requirements of new immigrants will cost the tax payer £1 billion a year for the next twenty five years. That is the conclusion of a study published by Migrationwatch today.
The study found that 45 additional social homes would have to be built everyday, or nearly 1400 a month, over that period to meet the extra demand.
The failure to build local authority housing to compensate for council houses that have been sold off led to a fall of about half a million in the number of social homes available between 1997 and 2007. This, combined with high levels of immigration, has led to an increase of nearly 60% in the waiting lists for social housing England over the last eight years.
The regions most severely affected were London where the proportion of households on the waiting list in 2010 was 12% and Yorkshire and Humberside where it was 11%. Both are regions of high immigration.
The study also found that non EU migrants were more likely to live in social housing that the UK born. For some nationalities the difference was striking:- Nigeria (29%), Iran (33%), Jamaica (35%), Ghana (39%), Portugal (40%), Bangladesh (41%), Turkey (49%), Somalia (80%) compared to UK born for whom the proportion was 17%.
Commenting, Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said:
"The impact of immigration on the availability of social housing for British people has been airbrushed out for too long. Either the government must cut immigration very substantially as they have promised or they must invest very large sums in the construction of extra social housing".