Minister: migrants caused house price boom
Dominic Rabb claims extra demand for homes produced a 20pc rise in value over 25 years
IMMIGRATION has driven up house prices by 20 per cent over the last quarter of a century, a senior minister has claimed.
Dominic Raab, the housing minister, said figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed immigration had caused a significant rise in the cost of housing and that the UK’S post-brexit border controls must take into account demand for affordable homes.
Theresa May, the Prime Minister, has made boosting the supply of houses a key plank of her domestic agenda and the Government has a target of building 300,000 new homes a year by 2025.
But Mr Raab said increasing the supply of housing also needed to be accompanied by consideration of housing demand. He told The Sunday Times that he was writing to the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to ask it to consider the effects of migration on the UK housing market.
The suggestion that immigration has put up house prices by 20 per cent is likely to reignite calls for Britain to adopt tough border rules after Brexit.
Mr Raab said civil servants had told him immigration had a significant impact on the price of homes, based on ONS data from 1991 to 2016.
He said: “Based on the ONS data, the advice to me from the department is that in the last 25 years, we have seen immigration put house prices up by something like 20 per cent.”
In February, it emerged that net migration from Europe had fallen below 100,000 for the first time in six years with some 90,000 more EU migrants arriving in Britain than left in the year to September 2017.
Overall net long-term international migration was 244,000 in the 12 months to September, a year-on-year drop of around 29,000, or 11 per cent.
The Government has pledged to reduce immigration to “sustainable levels” and is targeting “annual net migration in the tens of thousands”. Mr Raab said: “You’ve got to deal with demand as well as supply. You can’t have housing taken out of the debate around immigration.
“If we delivered on the Government’s target of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands every year, that would have a material impact on the number of homes we need to build every year.”
The Government has asked the MAC to produce a report to help inform the UK’S post-brexit immigration system. It is due to publish its findings in the autumn. Mr Raab said: “The MAC is right to look at the positive impact immigration has had on the country. At the same time you can’t airbrush the costs and the impact it has on housing.”
Immigration was one of the most prominent battlegrounds during the EU referendum. However, an impact assessment leaked in February to The Daily Telegraph sparked concerns that post-brexit border rules may not be as stringent as some Brexiteers would like.
The assessment showed ministers were planning for a number of different scenarios, and one would see just 40,000 fewer EU migrants a year.