The truth about immigrants and housing shortage

[Strawbal]

What is the truth? Is the country housing immigrants at the cost of our own housing crisis?

I'm bombarded with many differing viewpoints (on this and many issues) and I can’t sort the wheat from the chaff

Dubai has always been propped up financially by Abu Dhabi because they have the bulk of the oil.

They take whole families as workers and abuse them, enslave them and etc. I have an American online friend who is married with a Philipines lady. Their neighbours asked her for few females for domestic servants, he paid their sponsorship and now beats them ....not sure what else is going on. My American friend does not hold any power to do anything for his sisters relatives

he is a stupid man to lick these guys asses for money instead living in the USA, but that is another topic ( he himself owns massage parlour )

Yes, thats right. It certainly hasn't caused it, BUT, it has made things a lot worse.

A simple maths of you have 100 houses but now need 250 leaves you 150 short. If you add in 150 extra families needing homes due to immigration, that's 300 houses short.

Immigration of people reliant on social housing and all of the rest of it has made things worse. And it was already bad due to Right to Buy.

How long will we continue to allow this and at what cost? Until you physically cannot send a child to school because there is no space? Until you can't access your local pharmacy because they never have your meds in stock? Obviously even things the way they are now, that's a long way off. But surely all resources can only ever go so far?

Disclaimer being that the answer probably isn't palatable to a lot of us. So I don't know what the answer is.

My Nan is an Immigrant but I'm not sure if she was technically one by law as she came from an overseas British territory. People definitely viewed her as one, though. And she had some awful comments.

@BigFatLiar you are quite right. When the RTB was expanded and made more appealing to tenants, local authorities were specifically banned from using the money to build more housing. It was clearly a political move, the idea being that homeowners would vote Tory. Sadly the Labour Party did nothing to put that right. I think another result was that working class people just gave up being interested in politics as they felt no one was bothered about their needs. The Tories of the 50s did, at the very least, acknowledge that council houses were a good thing. It might have been the equivalent of 'bread and circuses', but they didn't deliberately prevent the building of council homes for the working class.

Because they know how to stay wealthy.

You’re not accounting for people leaving the UK, or that the majority of that 750k are people who can afford to privately rent or buy,

Yes and No.
A few months ago, the home office had a bit of a clear out of outstanding asylum claims. This resulted in a lot of people being turned down for asylum. They either went underground, returned home or started the arduous appeal process.
It also resulted in a lot of people all getting Indefinite Leave to Remain at about the same time. Those in asylum seeker accommodation were evicted and became the responsibility of Glasgow City Council as homeless people. This tipped the council into a "housing emergency".
So....very superficially you could say that immigration has caused a shortage of housing.
But....more realistically you'd have to place the immediate blame on the home office for allowing a large backlog of cases to build up, instead of processing them at a steady pace over the last couple of years.
You can also blame the councils decision to pass the vast majority of its housing stock onto housing associations in 2003.
And you can blame the largest housing association (The Wheatley Group) for systematically demolishing large amounts of its stock and replacing very little of it.
In general housing is fucked. We could all do with a massive council house building program. If everyone had access to secure, reasonably priced tenancies it would solve so many social problems. The current racial tensions being just one.

Successive governments have refused to see the facts of the situation, we're quite a poor country and should have economic policies that reflect the countries situation. And help needs to be given to ensure that more people are able to live and only seek government support where absolutely necessary. Cost of private housing and general COL is affecting fat too many people

@tetheredgoat South Oxfordshire - Ukrainians - your Polish friend is correct.
I have no knowledge of ex soldiers sleeping in the streets though.
Ex forces sleeping rough in London, I have met them, the charities like the 'soup runs' know them.

Where I live, I would say roughly half or more of the housing allocated by the council is immigrants (these are in the majority African, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Arabic, Indian) and the other half is British. In my own block of flats it is 4/6 white British, 2/6 African (previously 3/6 African 3/6 white British).

The other reason for the affordable housing shortage is older people staying in large houses alone. The government should focus on building bungalows for the aging population as well as building new family homes (not flats!).

Perhaps they have though and still need a house but are on low wages. They may pay council tax and their parents have also paid into the system

But isn’t it a balance? I mean myself and my husband were immigrants in the UK and we paid (a lot of money!) for housing. Of course a British person could have bought the house instead so maybe we took up housing stock… But my husband and I also worked in jobs where honestly you can’t get enough British people to fill them - we both trained for several years so random mr or ms X on benefits really can’t take over our jobs. We work and pay very high taxes… so yes we need to buy a house and put our children in school. But do some people think doctors are going to commute over every day to the NHS?! We left btw…

The poor are treated basically as slaves there, and they would not be able to get citizenship. Muslim ' brothers' or not. There are different Islamic sects who basically hate each other. This is the cause of much of the unrest in the ME, with Saudi Arabia and Iran fighting proxy wars to stop the other gaining influence. They have caused much of the refugee crisis in the first place.

Net immigation figures do take account of people leaving the UK.
Also, it doesn’t matter if the immigrants can afford to privately rent or buy, they are still taking up accommodation which means that massive numbers of new properties are needed year on year just to house the 750k new arrivals.

yes, exactly. There will be day a day when white British men will go out and smash it all if the foreign wives have that sort of attitude and gloat over all the free perks they have while British born women have got nothing.

these are serious times and ethnic tensions are rising, I would be careful what I wish for.

They aren’t nice places - only look after their own tribes.

I live in London and all immigrated people I know actually pay for rent or buy a house with extended family. As far as I'm aware you're not even eligible for social housing when you're on a visa which people stay on for first 5-10 years (by which time they have often bought a house).
However the only people I know who use social housing are people who were born here, hence not immigrants. I can't claim it applies to all but that is what I have seen.

Perhaps this is naive, but I had assumed most refugees want to work, so once they are out of their initial accommodation they will have secured jobs and can rent. Why is there an assumption that they will simply move into council housing?

I suspect a lot of the data problem is to do with the concept of foreign.

In 1948 the British nationality act gave British nationality status to all commonwealth citizens.

www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z8sdbk7/revision/4#:~:text=The%20British%20Nationality%20Act%201948,migrants%20increased%20during%20the%201950s.

In particular anyone born in Britain or any one of its colonies had British citizenship.

As the various colonies declared independence complicated arrangements were made.

So if someone came from say Ghana before it declared independence they are British but may not have Ghanain citizenship. What they are not is foreign.

The arrangements have been "simplified" since 1981 but this still happens - the U.K. gov recently gave 5.4 million holders of the BNO (British national overseas) passports the right to settle in the UK.

These people have never lived in Britain but they are British.

The housing crisis is complex. It has a number of causes, as follows:

• quantatitve easing, starting in 2008, pushed asset prices sky high, meaning that people could not afford to get on the housing ladder and had to rent for longer;
• Help to Buy, intended to 'fix' the above mentioned problem, had the knock on effect of creating a 'floor' for starter prices for new homes at £400k, edging prices up further
• Help to Buy, because it was essentially state subsidised operating profit for housebuilding companies, caused those housebuilding companies to start building up and sitting on their landbanks.
• This caused a supply demand imbalance resulting in landowners jacking up their prices, meaning house prices went up further so housebuilders could protect their operating margin
• The collapse of SME housebuilders meaning that what we have now is an oligopoly of large housebuilders who can and do act as a cartel to fix prices...
• ...and they also only do starts on large developments because they cannot make smaller ones profitable. Only the SMEs can do that but the SME market has collapsed
• Insufficient rental market regulation meaning a flood of 'buy to rent' rentiers, thinking they're oh-so-clever to invest in a flat or two to rent but actually making scarcity and pricing worse for renters
• Collapse of SME construction companies between 2012 and 2024
• Green Belt and byzantine planning system meaning that it can take up to 15 years to get a new start!

What this is NOT, is the fault of Right to Buy. My parents exercised their right to buy - for us working classes it is a really important step to social mobility because we then have an asset we can leave to our children.

To say it is the fault of right to buy is a classist dog whistle. To say it is the fault of immigration is a racist dog whistle.

The problems are multifaceted as you will see above, there are a number of factors preventing the timely building of new homes, that keep asset prices high and make renting so expensive that people cannot save for a new home.

Labour's plans to redesignate the so called green belt was an excellent start. They understand the scale of the problem and are showing a determination to fix it.

They should also tax 'buy to rent' rentiers out of existence.

@unlimiteddilutingjuice ,the point about housing associations is that the RTB doesn't exist in the same way as it does with local authorities. There may be a right to aquire but it's not so generous in its discount. Lots of l/as did a large scale transfer to housing associations for that reason.

LOL, everyone hated the Polish first, but now they are the second Brits !

Because many have no transferable skills, no deposit to rent privately and more importantly they are often guided by the agency dealing with them to present as homeless once they are given leave to remain and have to quit the accommodation provided for them as asylum seekers.

I would imagine it's more to do with the British-born person (in your example) having ancestors who have paid into the 'system.'

Do you know what proportion of people turning up to use the food bank do not need to genuinely do so?