How migrants dominate the great social housing divide
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FOR young professionals and working families, living in London is an increasingly distant dream. London property is among the most expensive in the world; rent alone can be £3,500 a month or more.
Given this, a social housing tenancy – owned by a local authority or housing association – can save a London renter thousands of pounds a year. Over a lifetime, the benefit is comparable to a lottery win.
Council home waiting lists in London are massively oversubscribed. More than 300,000 households are registered. However, access to social housing is unevenly distributed. According to the 2021 census, 23.5 per cent of London households headed by someone born in the UK were living in social housing. By contrast, an astonishing near-I75 per cent of households headed by someone born in Somalia were in social housing – more than three times the rate for UK-born households.
The rates for other foreign-born groups are just as jaw-dropping: 49 per cent of Jamaican-born households in London live in social housing, as do 44 per cent of Bangladeshi-born households and 41 per cent of Nigerian-born households. Those four groups alone occupy more than 100,000 London social homes.
The implied subsidy – the difference between market rent and the sub-market rent paid by social housing tenants, adjusted for differences in property size and bedroom numbers – is substantial. The Pimlico Journal has calculated the per-household implied subsidy to be over £11,000 per year, putting the cost of accommodating just Somali, Jamaican, Bangladeshi and Nigerian households in London social housing at over £1billion a year!
Why is this allowed to continue? Why is Britain spending so much money and devoting scarce resources to import millions of people who cannot support themselves? Why, when a migrant presents himself to the local authority to plead poverty and entitlement to a social home, is he not simply given a plane ticket home?
Our government has to get real and put the interests of its citizens ahead of those making their way here because the UK is a more congenial place to live. It is simply unjust and unfair that the state – ie, the British taxpayer – is footing the bill for policies they have never consented to or even been asked about.
For many recent arrivals, a free ticket home would be a more appropriate and perhaps the kinder option. It would also better serve the interests of the British public. Drawing on scarce resources and providing social homes – of which there is a massive shortage – in one of the world’s most expensive cities, is a sure path to bankruptcy and increased social tensions.
Responding to Migration Watch’s tweet on the topic, environmentalist and campaigner Ben Goldsmithlaid out the damage mass migration (and the housing necessary to accommodate new arrivals) is doing to our country:
