The unsayable truth about the U.K. housing crisis is that prices are so high because demand is strong, and demand is strong because the U.K. has welcomed 10 million migrants in 25 years, writes Lionel Shriver in the Spectator. Shriver says she mentioned this on a BBC Radio show earlier this year and the breach of taboo was palpable: “A sudden pin-drop silence followed by murmurous resettling in chairs conveyed shock, then palpable unease.” But the facts speak for themselves, she writes.
U.K. fertility has been below replacement rate for a startling 50 years. That helps explain why over the course of 25 of those years, 1973-1998, the population only grew from 56 million to 58.5 million. But in the next 25 years, U.K. population rose to nearly 68 million: 9.5 million new people in a generation, all while Britons were themselves under-reproducing? This demographic surge can only be down to immigration, and these new inhabitants must live somewhere. Half of the social housing in London is occupied by immigrant-led households. In my heavily council-owned neighbourhood, the students who flood the pavements on weekday afternoons are nearly all ethnically Asian or African.
This week, a Government impact statement estimates that within three years the bill for housing asylum seekers is on track to multiply by five times to £30 million a day, or £11 billion a year. Indeed, one of the biggest pull factors drawing migrants from Calais is that France doesn’t provide uninvited visitors housing in the way that Britain does. The small boats situation has understandably become a point of popular sensitivity (translation: rage). Thousands of people wading from overloaded dinghies onto beaches in Kent to throw themselves on British mercy make a powerful visual impression, and the crisis is real enough. So far, Government efforts to stem this tide have failed, but at least a few politicians are trying. Nevertheless, asylum is a sideshow. It serves the function of the magician’s sleight of hand. The audience is distracted by one motion while the trick is slyly performed with another.
Britain’s population is soaring from legal immigration. Last year a Conservative government let 1.2 million people move to the U.K., resulting in net immigration of 606,000. In a statistically meticulous report released recently, Migration Watch calculates that if this same level of ingress is sustained, the U.K.’s population will rise to between 83 and 87 million by 2046. This will require between six and eight million more homes – the equivalent of 15 to 18 Birminghams.
Apologies for the catastrophism, but that’s assuming the 606,000 annual influx remains constant, whereas the trend since Tony Blair came to power has been for net inward migration to keep rising. That lower population threshold of 83 million by 2046 also assumes the continuance of an alarmingly suppressed birth rate of 1.53 children per woman as of 2021, a glumly unenthusiastic rate of reproduction that may have been influenced by oppressive, not to mention depressing, pandemic policies. Most new adult immigrants are of childbearing age, and Britain’s overwhelmingly non-European arrivals abundantly hail from cultures that favour larger families. In other words? A population of only 83 million by 2046 is optimistic, and the Migration Watch upper boundary of 87 million, using the higher total fertility rate of 1.77, may be more realistic. We’re not talking about the distant, unimaginable future, either. If you have small children, 2046 is about the point at which they’ll be starting families of their own (if we’re lucky) and hoping to buy a home.
Officially, the government aims to build 300,000 homes per year. In practice, the number actually built in England has averaged 180,000 per year in the past decade, reaching only 235,000 last year. At current rates of immigration, between 263,000 and 313,000 homes would have to be built every single year to accommodate rising population (in addition to the new homes a steady-state population requires, because buildings don’t last for ever). Were immigration reduced to 100,000 arrivals per year, the population would go ever so slightly down, and Britain would solely need to replace housing stock that has decayed.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Court of Appeal has today blocked the Government’s Rwanda plan aimed at stopping the small boats, with two of the three judges saying they did not deem Rwanda to be a safe country for migrants. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett, dissented from a decision that, frankly, sounds a bit racist. The Government will now appeal to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the boats continue. And that’s just illegal immigration.
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