The National Federation of Builders say they need to import migrants to build homes for the United Kingdom’s soaring population, which is now only rising because of migrant arrivals.
More people die than are born in the United Kingdom every year, yet the population is soaring at the fastest rate in recorded history thanks to mass migration. The number of people arriving every single day for many years has led to a massive increase in demand for places for people to live, a pressure expressed through the market mechanism of price.
The United Kingdom is now one of the most expensive places to buy or rent in the world, an area of serious angst and emerging political conflict as young people face the prospect of never being able to own their own homes on an average wage.
While border control would go some way to relieve this pressure by slowing the rate of demand growth, establishment political parties have shown a strong preference for increasing supply instead, concreting over ever larger swathes of the country and punishing local authorities that try to resist orders from central government to build.
Left-wing leader Sir Keir Starmer has promised to get Britain building with 1.5 million new homes by the end of this Parliament, but housebuilders themselves say there aren’t enough tradesmen in the country to build that quickly. Rejecting the possibility of training new craftsmen, they turn instead to the open doors of Britain’s borders.
Broadsheet The Daily Telegraph reports The National Federation of Builders (NFB) said as they asked for “hundreds of thousands” of temporary visas for employees:
We need workers in all areas, especially specialist ones such as steel workers in London for tall buildings. Having experienced workers is vital, and that can only currently come from immigration and people coming back into the sector. It’s not just direct construction either, as we also need experienced trainers in colleges and building control officers.”
The report cited a figure of 250,000 extra employees needed in the next five years to keep housebuilding on the course dictated by central government. The United Kingdom is presently experiencing rising unemployment, but migration is apparently to be approached as the first recourse, as importing foreign-trained workers cuts out the time and expense of domestic apprenticeships.
In 2018, a study showed 82 per cent of population growth this century was down to immigration and migration has absolutely surged since. The population has increased by more than four million since 2011 and net arrivals are now close to one million a year. More people now die than are born, meanwhile the United Kingdom experiences the greatest surge in permanent migrant arrivals of any developed nation, the number having doubled from 2019 to 2023.
The relationship between the powerful housebuilding lobby, its donations, and the politics of mass migration is fascinating if little studied. As reported in 2022 at a time where critics of unlimited building were set upon with attack-dog like ferocity:
The plan is “evil”, Colvile explains, because it scraps “the two core policies that tell councils they have to build, and punish them for not doing so”. Worse, it would “enshrine nimbyism” — a slur against people who object to developments for any reason — and in his estimation demolish the economy… The construction industry, which probably stands to lose most from modifications to the forthcoming bill giving ordinary people more say, also figures here. Colvile has recently been appointed an advisor to the JCB group, a business building construction machinery whose chairman, Lord Bamford, is one of the most important donors to the Conservative Party. Lord Bamford also sits on the board of the CPS.
The relationship between construction equipment billionaire Lord Bamford and the Conservative Party is perhaps the apex of a considerable source of funding for Britain’s ruling party that may go some way to explain the hard reaction to attempts to modify a bill expressly intended to see more new houses built more quickly. As has been reported before, construction-related firms make up a considerable portion of the Conservative Party’s income, with a 2021 report noting a fifth of the Tories’ donations coming from the “residential property sector”.
A report in The Guardian on this relationship between the Conservatives, who have set Britain’s planning and housebuilding rules for over a decade, and the sector it is supposed to regulate, noted: “While it could not be conclusively proven that government decisions were shaped by this flow of money, such a reliance on housing-based donations created ‘a real risk of aggregative corruption’,”.
Criticism of such funding, while voiced by Labour, has of course been muted: the opposition party has its own web of influential donors and backers that it gains nothing by calling attention to.
None of this is to suggest any great conspiracy, of course, but rather to reflect on the simple existence of interest and allegiance which, while not at all hidden, are also not proudly paraded before the noses of voters. And none of this even touches on the less base interests of the Conservatives in housebuilding, that home ownership is well known to create Tory voters out of people.
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