We now have proof that mass migration is making Brits poorer
The cost of renting a home increased by a staggering 30 per cent from mid-2021 to the start of this year, while wages rose by 17 per cent in the same period. Compare that with the record of the preceding decade, when rents rose by 26 per cent, just 1 per cent less than the increase in wages.
According to analysis by Capital Economics, rents in the 2021-24 period climbed 11 per cent higher than they would otherwise have done thanks to the unprecedented levels of immigration over which this government has presided. Andrew Wishart, who runs the housing service at Capital Economics, said: “This means rents are 11 per cent higher than would be explained by the usual relationship between pay and rent. The vast majority of that is because of higher net migration.”
The arithmetic is straightforward: figures show that in the two years from mid-2021 to June 2023, based on the average household size, net immigration led to an additional 430,000 households looking for homes in the private rented sector. Meanwhile, the government’s own target to build an extra 300,000 new homes every year has never been met. More demand plus static provision equals higher costs.
This disastrous failure by ministers is having a real-time, real-life impact on the quality of life of millions of people across the country. Yet even across the political divide, there is little talk of curbing immigration. More than 700,000 people arrived in the UK in 2022; to claim that this does not have a significant negative impact on local services, including housing, schools and hospitals, is dangerously irresponsible. And that extra economic growth and vast new tax revenue that we were promised new arrivals would bring? Britain’s anaemic growth figures and our historically high personal taxation levels might suggest that that theory is somewhat optimistic.
Theresa May never escaped the shadow of her hubristic promise that the Conservatives would reduced net immigration to under 100,000 a year, especially since, at the time the promise was made, we were still in the EU and subject to freedom of movement rules. She came nowhere near to delivering on that promise and her successors have quietly abandoned it. Since leaving the EU, the Government has presided over record levels of immigration, and now, as a consequence, they are presiding over the higher rents and pressures on local services that are the inevitable consequences of high immigration.
If ministers’ intentions were to inflame racial divisions in this country, they could hardly do a better job. Britons, more than any other European country, have welcomed and integrated with immigrant communities so long as their own standards of living were not adversely impacted by their arrival. Now that we have direct, hard evidence that more than 10 per cent of rent increases – particularly in London where rent is the highest in the country – can be attributed to immigration, it would be natural if resentments were to intensify – against immigration policy, if not against immigrants themselves.
Does the Government even have an immigration policy? Or does it imagine that such decisions can be left up to the market (and, of course, the higher education sector) to find the right level of immigration without ministerial interference?
That’s a dangerous game. The traditional criticism levelled at the Conservatives is that they champion the rights of elites and ignore the consequences for the most vulnerable. Those who rent, and who cannot yet afford to purchase their own property, should be a top priority for any government. These are the (predominantly) younger, aspiring voters by whom future voting trends are shaped, and by whom future governments are elected.
This current generation has been badly let down, not just by a government, but by a political philosophy that prioritises new arrivals over UK citizens.
