Mass migration has pushed up house prices by 20 per cent, the housing minister has confirmed, admitting the link between open borders and soaring property prices.
Data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government (MHCLG) drawn from Office of National Statistics (ONS) data shows that house prices have risen by a fifth over the past 25 years as a result of immigration, said Dominic Raab.
While Prime Minister Theresa May has spoken only of a need to boost housebuilding on the topic of Britain’s housing crisis, Raab confessed that the Government also deal with demand when drawing up rules for post-Brexit border control.
“You can’t have housing taken out of the debate around immigration,” he told the Sunday Times. “If we delivered on the Government’s target of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands every year, that would have a material impact on the number of homes we need to build every year.”
Raab also disclosed in the interview that he is urging the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to consider the negative impact of immigration on housing demand in addition to the “positive” contribution to GDP, ahead of a report due in the Autumn which will be the basis for the Government’s migration policy.
“The MAC is right to look at the positive impact immigration has had on the country. At the same time you can’t just airbrush the costs and the impact it has on housing,” said the Brexit-backing minister, who was appointed to the role in January.
Raab’s announcement, which implied that MAC reports have been neglecting to take into account some of the setbacks of mass migration, illustrates “the dangers of over-reliance on independent bodies to steer inherently political policy questions in an era when appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’,” according to ConservativeHome’s Henry Hill.
“How many of us, when weighing expert interventions from groups such as the MAC, stop to consider the political assumptions underlying their frame of reference?,” he asked in a blog post on Sunday.
“If it had delivered a report on the economic impact of immigration that didn’t encompass housing, how long might we have debated the policy implications of those findings before someone noticed?”
“At long last the Government have accepted the obvious,” UKIP leader Gerard Batten told Breitbart London.
“If you increase demand in a limited market, and 300,000 net inward migration cannot but do this, then prices, both to buy and to rent, will rise.
“I’m just amazed that it has taken so long for anybody in the main parties to acknowkedge the obvious.”
UKIP London Assembly Member David Kurten said the role of mass migration in “driving up house prices and driving down wages, while putting immense pressure on schools, hospitals and GP surgeries” was already “obvious to everyone” outside of the “Westminster bubble”.
“Nevertheless, his government is still willing to leave the door of uncontrolled immigration open for another 2 years by signing a Transition Treaty with the EU, and some people in his party would like to continue with it forever,” he told Breitbart London.
“Unless there is an immediate change to control our borders and undo the damage of the last 20 years, these are just empty words.”
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