The reason we have a shortage of homes is that too many of them are lived in by foreigners ( like me)
SINCE Theresa May’s clarion call to address the UK’s housing shortage (and how many successive prime ministers have embarked on the same brave heave-ho?) countless comment pieces have addressed the ‘real’ problems that drive the disjunction between supply and demand.
Nimbyism. Complex, protracted planning permission. Developer land banking (when companies own vast plots of land but do not build on them). Rich Chinese and Russians investing in unoccupied properties as three - dimensional bank accounts. Excessive protection of green belts. Second homeowners. The catastrophic sell- off of social housing.
Awkward
Yet, when two statistics are out of whack — in this case the number of homes available, and the number needed — it behoves us to look at them both. All the above dysfunctions regard supply.
Which suggests there’s something awkward about looking instead at demand.
At a Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival event last weekend, I all but came to blows with the ‘ rational optimist’ on my panel, who believes continued human population growth will be both modest and benign.
The moment I mentioned the inevitable pressures on Europe of mass migration, the poor gentleman exploded, as if I’d tripped the pin on a hand grenade. He railed about how we screwed up in Libya, and the need of the NHS for more overseas staff.
Give the guy this, he did rouse righteous applause from the great and the good progressives in the audience.
But let’s look at this housing business. It took half a century for the UK population to rise from 50.3 million in 1950 to 59.1 million in 2000.
In that period, the foreignborn population rose from 4.3 per cent to 8.8 per cent — so a measure of that increase was already accounted for by newcomers. After an inflow historically unprecedented for this country, this brief century alone has seen the UK population shoot up to 65.6 million (as of January 2017), 14 per cent of whom were foreign-born as of 2016.
We’re adding another halfmillion every year.
According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK population is set to cross 70 million by 2029; Migration Watch places it even sooner, in 2026. Demographic predictions are notoriously undependable, but near- term projections tend to be more reliable.
Oxford demographer David Coleman estimates 85 per cent of the UK’s population increase from 2000 to 2015 is explained by migrants and their children. These new people have to live somewhere.
The pressure on housing, among many other social provisions, is intensified by the fact that, on average, foreign-born mothers have more children (2.06 in 2016) than women born in Britain (1.75).
Fertility among foreign-born mothers has certainly dropped. Yet the high proportion of incomers who are in their reproductive years means the absolute number of babies with foreign mothers continues to rise.
Thus the ONS asserts that in England and Wales in 2016 a staggering 28.2 per cent of births were to foreign-born women, ‘the highest level on record’. In 1970, it was 12 per cent.
We’ve heard about Britain’s recent ‘mini-baby boom’, but its primary cause isn’t nativeborn women using the NHS to have IVF in their 40s and bearing triplets. It’s not appreciably caused by immigrants from eastern Europe, either.
As of 2011, mothers born in Poland averaged 2.1 children — while mothers born in Pakistan had 3.8, and mothers born in Somalia had 4.2.
So even Brexit — assuming it actually happens, and actually curtails freedom of movement ( ha! on both counts) — may not appreciably constrain foreign increase.
The housing crunch is further complicated by the fact many immigrants settle in the South East, where residential shortages are keenest. The population of Greater London in 2017 was 8.8 million, a rise of 400,000 on the previous five years. Greater London housed only 7.1 million people in 1997, when Tony Blair opened the gates to permanent visitors.
That’s 1.7 million more residents in two decades — an increase of over a quarter, two-thirds of which occurred in the past ten years.
As of 2016, only 45 per cent of the capital was white British.
An astonishing 58.2 per cent of births in London were to foreign-born mothers. (In the north-west London borough of Brent, 76 per cent were to non-UK-born women.)
While over a third of the babies born in England and Wales had at least one parent born outside the UK, in London that figure was 66.6 per cent: two-thirds.
Demand
Look, I know all about the fact that immigrants to the UK take up space, because I am an immigrant to the UK. Both Americans, my husband and I occupy a threebedroom Georgian house — thus removed from the stock available to folks born here.
In a 2012 speech, Theresa May said: ‘One area in which we can be certain mass immigration has an effect is housing. More than one-third of all new housing demand in Britain is caused by immigration. And there is evidence that without the demand caused by mass immigration, house prices could be ten per cent lower over a 20-year period.’
Last year, Lord Green, Chairman of Migration Watch, told the House of Lords at least 300 houses would have to be built every day to accommodate new migrants. And using projections published by the Department for Communities and Local Government, a Migration Watch study concluded half of Britain’s homes built in the next 21 years will be needed to house our migrant population.
None of these, if anything, understated statistics takes into account how many recent immigrants already occupy existing properties, whose removal from the market helps drive the need for so much additional housing in future. After all, if you took immigration out of the equation, the UK population would level off, before going down.
Crisis
Indeed, most immigration statistics are untrustworthy — because they’re too low. London Councils chairman Merrick Cockell told the BBC back in 2008: ‘London’s population is growing at an even faster rate than these figures suggest, because official data has failed to properly account for the complexities of migration and population churn.’
A Westminster City Council spokeswoman chimed in: ‘The statistics leave out a massive “hidden” population and mean that local authorities are constantly short-changed by government as they still provide vital services to these people, but receive no government funding for them.’
Government has a) no idea how to track people with every motivation to keep off the radar, and b) every motivation itself to underestimate an unpopular social phenomenon, with a range of consequences, it cannot seem to control.
Do I sound bigoted? People can be bigoted, but facts can’t be. The UK’s housing crisis rests hand-in-glove with mass immigration. Without a doubt, nimbyism, arcane planning permission rules, Russian oligarchs — all that — make the situation worse.
But effectively, even if Theresa May improbably abracadabra- ed 1.5 million additional homes into this country by 2022, as pledged in the Tory manifesto? They’d be built for foreigners like me.
A VERSION of this article appears in this week’s Spectator magazine.