A new report has revealed the extent to which Britain’s housing crisis has been driven by mass immigration, with young people “paying the price” for this policy through ever-rising rents.
Migration Watch UK found that the “unprecedented” net migration of 2.5 million people over the past decade has been one of the main factors in pricing young people out of the UK housing market.
Published Thursday, the paper found that mass migration is the “major component” fueling the heavy demand on housing that has sent rent prices sky-high and made it hard for Britain’s young to save for a house deposit.
Migrant families make up nine out of 10 new households added in the last decade, according to the think tank which reported that “London is bearing the brunt of ballooning demand for rental properties.”
Households headed by foreigners accounted for more than 80 per cent of growth in the UK capital’s private-rented sector over the past 10 years, a period in which the report says rents rose by 36 per cent while wages grew just 21 per cent.
One major result of demand for housing in Britain outpacing supply is that young people have increasingly been priced out of the housing market, according to the paper.
“Young people in particular have been negatively affected with many having to stay longer in shared accommodation or remaining in the family home with their parents.
“This delay in settling down in their own home can lead to other important life decisions being delayed, such as having children,” said the study, which pointed to figures from Shelter which found 59 per cent of 18-44 year olds in Britain reporting being “forced to put their lives on hold as a result of the housing crisis”.
In the last 10 years the share of 25 to 34-year-olds in England who own their own home has plummeted from 57 per cent to 38 per cent, the migration policy think tank found, noting that the proportion of home owner-occupiers in the same age bracket shot up from 24 per cent to 46 per cent during the past decade.
UKIP immigration spokesman John Bickley blasted establishment political parties for neglecting to mention the role of mass migration in policy discussions regarding the “major housing crisis” in Britain.
“They blame each other for the housing crisis and desperately try to deflect the audience’s gaze away from what they have been solely responsible for: uncontrolled immigration,” he said of Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Conservative MPs.
Veteran journalist Stephen Glover struck a similar tone in a column for the Daily Mail, suggesting that “pigs might fly” before UK political figures agree to “accept the major role immigration has played in putting pressure on housing, the NHS and schools”.
In it, he complained of the situation at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, where MPs brought up homelessness and the overstretched NHS “without anyone mentioning the gigantic, but perennially mute, elephant in the room”.
Slamming the failure of the country’s media and political class for refusing to “mention the dreaded ‘I’ word in relation to the scarcity of resources”, Glover said it is “not remotely racist to suggest that if a country has net migration of around 250,000 every year for ten years, that is bound to place an extra strain on public services and the availability of housing”.