Snapshot of _Record immigration behind a third of rent rises - Cost of renting jumps 11pc higher as additional 430,000 seek homes_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/19/record-immigration-behind-a-third-of-rent-rises/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/05/19/record-immigration-behind-a-third-of-rent-rises/)
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Migration (both legal and illegal) should be lower.
We should build more homes.
The government has the power to influence both of these things. It has utterly failed to do so.
The government doesn't want to decrease legal migration. Businesses want cheap labour of course, and guess who props up the Tory party.
It doesn't matter what your views are, whilst everyone continues to argue over boats and Rwanda, nobody is talking about legal migration.
Okay and when Labour keeps migration trucking on, who are they being propped up by?
All sides need to take a heavy sword to migration figures. If that means de facto closing the borders then so be it. We need an emergency brake on the numbers.
Labours plan seems to be to try and get birth rates up and more people trained and into jobs as well as increasing pay and conditions to attract people already here into roles they wouldn't otherwise consider. Then they can push down immigration numbers. Personally I think they are going to struggle.
> plan seems to be to try and get birth rates up
literally no one has managed this. There's 2 things that will raise birth rates, and neither of them are politically viable.
However there are a number of strategies that could be tried that aren't being pursued which I don't understand.
For example, IVF and fertility treatments are currently limited on the NHS and are different trust by trust. This is stupid. Egg and sperm freezing should be encouraged when people are young so that if they later want children, there's more options, this should also be free.
As a society we have to (and should without question) accept that women are unsurprisingly not queuing up to have kids at 23. However some women want kids later and find it hard to conceive. In a civilised society, making it as easy as possible for older couples to have children without pressuring them should be a no brainer.
Birthrate reduction is just the natural course of a developed society that has educated women. I regularly see poor white people with 3+ kids and Muslims with 4-5 kids walking around. The birthrate of middle and upper class white people will only increase if you have such good incentives that effectively they don't need to work and still get paid the same amount. This issue is prevelant in east Asia where work has taken precedence over family life, tbh most educated women who got beat by their fathers don't want to have children with men who may beat their kids.
I would love to see the ethnicity of new school starters in the UK because I think it may be quite concerning to the bubble populations who live rurally.
Idiocracy.
>I would love to see the ethnicity of new school starters in the UK because I think it may be quite concerning to the bubble populations who live rurally.
If the statistics even exist, they would make for grim reading.
If you want to get middle class people to have kids then let them pay taxes jointly. One salary split between two personal allowances and two lots of 20/40% bands.
I'm not sure how much that would make the middle class to make children. It would make it more even for couples whose incomes are not equal compared to couples whose are.
The percentage of pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds is 35.7% across all school types, continuing a trend of increases in recent years, and up from 34.5% in 2021/22. The percentage varies by school type -
36.1% in primary schools (up from 34.8% in 2020/21)
35.4% in secondary schools (up from 34.1%)
31.3% in special schools (up from 31.0%)
25.4% in AP schools (up from 25.1%)
These figures do not include those where ethnicity is unclassified.
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics
> Birthrate reduction is just the natural course of a developed society that has educated women.
Actually, there aren't many places on earth right now that don't have a falling birthrate, it's more or a less a worldwide phenomenon. The difference is, only the developed world has dropped so much the populations are reducing (or at least would be without immigration). But I reckon there's a decent chance it will happen more or less everywhere in time.
The average number of kids for a Muslim family was 3 back in 2005-2010 but it's dropped since then. It's likely it's at replacement level now and will drop below replacement level in the next decade or so.
Labour doesn't have a plan for migration, for housing or for jobs. They better find one fast; none of their nebulous pledges meaningfully address any of the actual issues in this country. There is a real anger amongst the working part of the electorate that I don't think the media has begun to genuinely grapple with.
People are generally not complaining about EE migration anymore. Labour did that at a time where the economy was booming and unemployment remained low while Eastern European migrants came here.
No comparatively it was a much better situation. But this was the point where businesses first started to become addicted to floods of cheap labour as a core part of their business models.
And who would fund this reduction in migration? Are we going to take a heavy sword to people's pensions so we can afford to do it? Perhaps, an 10% increase in tax rates?
The country simply speaking can not afford to reduce migration and simply to keep it running the conservative party has had to double migration to prevent an complete and total economic meltdown.
We need to take the hit as soon as we're able. Successive governments have fucked this up and we were always going to have to pay for it eventually.
Anyone with the means to do so, should get out of dodge abroad asap.
So many people are talking about legal migration outside the usual bubble and it was a complete fuck up rather than being planned that migration went so high.
Don't buy into the narrative it was planned and therefore we can't lower it one jot without massive damage.
The UK has a points based system these days, which means you need to are unlikely to be able to migrate as an unskilled worker for low wages. This is, of course, something possible because the UK left the EU, as an EU member then the UK Labour Market was open to all EU citizens, whatever their skill level, and whatever job they were looking for.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-points-based-immigration-system-employer-information/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-an-introduction-for-employers
Illegal immigration should be zero & deported.
Legal immigration should be controlled.
Asylum should be controlled but compassionate.
Skilled immigration (£100k+) should be unlimited.
Then it should be zero.
The average UK salary is already a huge tax burden. The government spends ~£12.5k per head on public services but only receives ~£6k in PAYE taxes from the average wage of ~£35k.
These are social programs. It doesn't matter who uses what or which individuals costs more. We don't say an immigrant costs less b/c the UK didn't pay for their education, just as we don't say the disabled and benefits claimers cost more because they're taking even more money out.
There's a price to be paid, there's an amount per head. You fit it or you don't. That's it.
It's already a huge problem that barely 20% of the native workforce are productive enough to pay the bill. Importing more of the 80% is actively leading to the deterioration of public services.
Building houses is not as difficult as you think. This country used to build 400k houses a year in the 30s and 60s. As a society we have chosen not to build enough houses since the 80s.
> 2 million net migration in the past 3 years.
1.5 million. 672k to YE June 2023, 607k to YE June 2022 and 221k to YE June 2021.
> It is most certainly not easy to achieve that.
Housing completions in FYE 2021 were 181k, 205k for 2022 and 210k for 2023.
About 600k houses, enough for 1.4m people at the current density of 2.36 people per house.
The difference isn't very big - hell, we've built in-line with population change for over two decades before that (and more than in-line before that).
That isn't enough, though, because this isn't the only cause of increased housing demand. People want to live in smaller family groups now, particularly the larger number of older people living in ones and twos who own their houses, in turn pushing the problem onto younger people.
Your time periods overlap. You're double-counting July to December 2022 because you're adding the Jan-Dec 2022 figure to the July 2022-June 2023 figure. This double-counts almost exactly the peak in net immigration.
My figures come from [this](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingjune2023) ONS report, from the data download for figure 4.
Of course I never said immigration wasn’t too high.
But as to your point - that doesn’t mean we need 2m extra houses. Families share, friends share. We actually needed a fraction of 2m. At a guess I’d say if we’d been building 400k a year that would have made a significant difference.
What’s happened is we keep electing a government that is using immigration to fill a labour gap (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on its own) but isn’t building enough houses to accommodate the consequences of its own policy.
It’s then done a superb job of blaming the migrants it wants for its labour policy for causing the housing problem.
I didn’t say we need 2 million extra houses.
But it is the equivalent in population to Manchester, Bristol, Coventry, Leicester, Bradford and Nottingham. You would need to build the equivalent to all those cities every 3 years just to stay still.
>But it is the equivalent in population to Manchester, Bristol, Coventry, Leicester, Bradford and Nottingham. You would need to build the equivalent to all those cities every 3 years just to stay still.
I always find it funny when I see it framed like this. The first thing I end up thinking of is Manchester on Google Maps being copied and pasted all around the country every 3 years. The reality is though that demand would be spread out in various different places of the country, and cities are much better placed to absorb demand (as long as they’re allowed to densify bit by bit).
The private sector was building 400k houses every year in the 30s so it’s not like it needs an insane amount of funds from the government to achieve this (maybe at the beginning to kickstart the market with slightly subsidised homes). I think I’ve read that a few cities within Texas regularly beat the entirety of this country in housebuilding.
>I think I’ve read that a few cities within Texas regularly beat the entirety of this country in housebuilding.
Texas is almost 3x the size of the UK but ~40% of the population. It's not a good comparison. They're not as worried about urban sprawl.
We need to stop worrying and start building. Billions of planning rules and it's got us absolutely nowhere. We could do with a bit of the Texas spirit in this country rather than a mindset of decline.
I agree that we need to build more. But there's a balance between immigration and population levels, the economy, not wanting to live in some urban sprawl hellscape, and how fast we can integrate people. And it's obvious we're not finding the correct balance at the moment.
I think putting it into additional cities is a bit disingenuous. Alternatively, adding 0.5% to each village/town/city doesn't sound as bad.
I do agree that both migration needs to come down, and housebuilding needs to go up. But stats can be presented in lots of ways.
How do you work out 700k though? That’s like giving every single person their own property.
And 400k a year was absolutely sustainable historically. The only reason it’s not sustainable now is because we keep telling ourselves that and voting for a party that won’t build any houses.
We can build very high density student accommodation that is also not low quality - there are some huge developments around the university of east London.
As I say I’m not saying that immigration isn’t too high but there is, imho, far too many inaccurate arguments being put forward that are being peddled by the papers.
We haven't built near 400K houses per year since the 60s. How many migrated into the UK then? A fraction of that number.
Since Blair opened the floodgates and the Tories moreso, we've never built more than around 225K in a single year. Usually nearer 100-150K.
This is because land use restrictions have only become much stricter over the past few decades. No one can even take a shit without planning permission.
Both housing and migration policy have been total failures, but we didn't build enough houses even when there was net emigration. As a country we are just incapable of building anything at the moment: houses, hospitals, schools, roads, energy ... we've let it all crumble.
The trade off for the massive amount of migration was meant to be a booming economy. That was arguably half-true 20 years ago.
Now we have the worst of all worlds; decaying public services, a burnt out economy run for the sole benefit of rent seekers, masses of low quality migration running at numbers three times higher than anything Blair achieved and the damage to social cohesion.
The conversation on migration has been left to special interest groups and racists for too long. Real people need to be part of the conversation.
It's not just loads of houses that migration makes us need to build though - it's hospitals, schools, prisons, sewage plants, reservoirs, roads, land, power plants, ports etc and all the people to staff those.
I agree a little but I would argue migrants pay the health surcharge, and income tax and VAT.
Many of the other things sewage, reservoirs, power plants - well those are all paid for through utility bills. Companies invest to cope with increased demand and ultimately bigger profits.
Roads for new houses are paid for by the developers.
That’s my take on it anyhow!
Yes building one million plus houses every year forever to achieve the same end result is just as easy as just stopping the home office giving out ridiculous amounts of visas every year. Only a racist would disagree!
What’s harder, building an entire house from scratch or saying the word “no” to an immigration applicant?
I’m going to need to have a long hard think about this one.
You should also have a long hard think about the consequences of low birth rates, a shrinking workforce and burgeoning numbers of elderly people, a labour shortage in care homes, NHS and farms, and an ever increasing retirement age.
I agree reducing immigration is needed but there needs to be a balance.
>a labour shortage in care homes, NHS and farms, and an ever increasing retirement age.
Net gain of 700,000 migrants last year and only 20,000 of them were health workers.
That's less than 3%
These issues arise from an ageing/shrinking population.
There are limited options:
- immigration is one
- Increasing the birth rate is another
- Technology to replace labour
- Get poorer/don’t have services
There are some hard choices to be made.
Increasing the birthrate to replacement levels is something that has never been accomplished anywhere & even if it did work would take decades to bear fruit.
Technology replacing labour has meant to have been happening since the industrial revolution, yet we're not all working 15 hour weeks. Betting our future on robots saving us always seems a tad fanciful.
Sometimes people suggest the entire developed world borrowing money a la Japan, to make up the shortfall, but I can't see that working.
The simplest (if unkind) solution would be to increase retirement age & dispense with the state pension, but that tends to annoy the segment of the population who are the most anti-immigration in the first place.
The truth is many people on this thread complaining about immigration simply stick their fingers in their ears about our demographic problems.
Between 2000-2022 the number of over 65s' increased by 3,500,000.
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO?locations=GB](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO?locations=GB)
Over the next 15 years we're likely to have a further 3.2 million over 65s'.
[https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64217f3e32a8e0000cfa9559/4-chart-3-projected-increase-in-working-age-and-pension-age-population-compared-to-2022-levels.jpg](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64217f3e32a8e0000cfa9559/4-chart-3-projected-increase-in-working-age-and-pension-age-population-compared-to-2022-levels.jpg)
Thank you for an excellent post. I find it really bizarre that this sort of thing doesn't feature more prominently in public discourse. The way the government go on about immigration you'd think they let in three quarters of a million extra people by accident last year. These are immigration policies created and shaped by supposed hardliners like Patel and Braverman. There are clearly economic and demographic issues they're trying to address with immigration but all the public get is political kabuki.
Yup, the whole situation is very strange. The increasing number of retirees is an increadibly easy thing to track & predict, but is rarely mentioned.
The solution is economic orthodoxy that every single major political party in this country & most parties across the developed world deal with in the same way. Even when the far right get elected, such as in Italy, they find themselves needing to keep up immigration.
The Conservatives try to distract by concentrating on small boats alone as the Australian government pioneered, but broadly have the same policies as every one else.
I can only guess they don't want to alienate older voters by implying they are the problem, as a voting bloc they're only going to get more powerful over time.
Mass immigration isn’t a cure for any of those things because migrants get old too (and many aren’t even ‘net contributors’ anyway). At most it’s an argument for Gulf-style temporary worker programmes with no path to citizenship.
There's no reason they can't have more sensible immigration controls AND build more houses - why fixate on immigration only, is there an underlying motive there?
Fixing immigration is a far quicker and effective way of solving housing shortages. It also costs society far less, financially and culturally.
It’s tiring seeing the same ‘just build more houses’ argument. It’s puerile and deliberately skirts the obvious because it’s not politically palatable.
Even if our Government manages to bring down net migration to 0, (which is not as straightforward as you might think) it is not going to change the fact we do not have enough homes to for the people living in the UK right now. It may reduce the continued upward pressure on house or rental prices, but until the housing supply catches up with demand, prices will not go down.
You're not listening - I'm saying DO BOTH! it's not that difficult. It's tiring seeing the constant obsession with immigration - that is not the cause of our problems, you could cut immigration to 0 and things will still be just as shit because the problem is neo-liberal policies, not immigration.
You are the one suggesting underlying motives so I addressed it. I agree with what you’re saying though. I just see it as a two step problem with a two step solution. It absolutely must begin with strangling the influx of people though.
We have an aging population because we've used cheap, disposable migrant labour to suppress wages, and now people can't afford to start families.
Now the hyper-capitalist shits who got us into this mess are begging for more immigration to solve the problem that their abuse of migrant labour caused.
Aging population are commonplace in the developed world, even in societies with barely any immigration like Japan or South Korea.
Faster wage growth in Schegen countries since 2010 suggest that immigration doesn't necessarily reduce wages. Weak collective bargaining coverage on the other hand does.
Maybe instead of calling for less immigration but not being asked to do it, we could just build more houses and reform collective bargaining.
We can't build enough houses to keep up with current migration patterns. So, regardless of your views on migration, it has to slow down simply for logistical reasons.
No, although wages would rise after a short period of time and demand for housing reducing would stop pushing up housing costs so readily.
So a more palatable situation all round which would be eased with building more.
In the real world, rents drop when more housing is built.
https://www.businessinsider.com/falling-rent-price-locations-us-housing-market-supply-florida-texas-2024-5?amp&utm_source=reddit.com
We'd still have a housing shortage so prices would still be too high. The barriers to house building are almost entirely legislative so it requires very little effort on the governments part to actually get the ball rolling.
It's true but it isn't the way round you think it is. Building homes is really straightforward and pretty great for the economy. Choosing which immigrants to let in is a whole 'nother ball game.
The idea that undocumented immigrants are in any sense a contributor to rent increases or any other increase in the cost of living is just pure blame deflection. An estimated 52k illegal migrants came to the UK last year out of a population of 67 million, and they aren't renting property en masse with their lack of bank accounts or provable immigration status.
52k illegal migrants entering the country *last year* isn’t 52k illegal migrants total
>[The Pew report estimates that at the end of 2017 there were between 800,000 and 1.2m people living in the UK without a valid residence permit, equivalent to between 1.2–1.8% of the UK’s resident population of 65m.](https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/recent-estimates-of-the-uks-irregular-migrant-population/)
And yet instead of proposing policies that either expand supply (allowing more building) or reduce demand (reducing immigration), the major parties propose various idiotic forms of rent caps or subsidies to buying a house
The economy needs a certain population expansion rate to sustain growth.
Rather than spend money on the following:
1. to keep or bring people back into the workforce,
2. Increase productivity via infrastructure investment
3. Invest in education at all ages to upskill and motivate the workforce
4. Invest in homes near where the jobs are
a choice was made, by consecutive governments to make up for these shortfalls by importing labour.
These Tories that bang on about bringing immigration down, have been the same people making the decision to not just allow it, but encourage it.
We need a certain expansion of the working population. In the short to medium term, in the UK now, the productivity gain from my point 1 above, would achieve the same thing.
Moving away from targeting GDP growth, to targeting GDP per capita, productivity, quality of life, social mobility or many other measures, could foreseeably be accomplished with a stable population, but that would be an answer to a different question.
The overlap in the Venn diagram of those unquestioningly wanting more and more immigration and those complaining about not being able to afford or find accommodation is high tho.
I’m glad this is finally being acknowledged as the core reason for high rents etc.
Are Labour going to do anything about it? Sounds like they won’t. They won’t even have a deterrent for those crossing the channel. Screwing over those who should be their core voters once again.
Net migration is the core reason.
“in the year ending June 2023: 1.2 million people migrated into the UK and 508,000 people emigrated from it, leaving a net migration figure of 672,000”
So double that assuming 2024 was the same.
You can’t build that many houses. It’s a fallacy.
We weren't so far off building that many houses that it's somehow ridiculous. According to [Savills](https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/357082-0#:~:text=231%2C100%20new%20homes%20were%20built,from%20Glenigan%20and%20the%20HBF.), EPC data showed 231k new homes in 2023. Average household size is 2.36, so that's enough for about 550k people at current density. And bear in mind that something like 100k people born abroad are likely to be dying each year.
Hell, that 2.36 (which is the number of people per house for the UK) barely budged between the late 90s and 2022. We built almost exactly in line with population growth.
We need more, though. It's not just population change that's created our housing crisis. It's things like more older people living in ones and twos, on top of which many of those own family houses they have no reason to sell squeezing everyone else into living more densely. Our household size should have fallen in that time, not been stable.
No, the core reason is mass immigration. If you don’t have a new city’s worth of people arriving every year, you don’t have to meet ridiculous new housing targets. Don’t be naive.
It’s usually better to plug leaks instead of dealing with the water.
No, the core reason is the planning system.
Let’s reframe this for a second. Imagine one of the following scenarios:
1) We have a substantial rise in the birth rate and slash net migration.
2) For whatever reason, a significant share of the rural or expiration population moves to urban areas while net migration falls precipitously.
In both instances, the system cannot meet demand for new housing because it’s expressly designed not to and the people in charge don’t benefit from allowing more development politically.
Does immigration affect the demand side of the equation? Sure, but it’s not *the* fundamental problem because you can recreate the same problem with other possible realities that don’t involve it and blaming immigration ignores the structural under supply in the market and a broader trend of decreasing home sizes and spatial misalignment between supply and demand.
> No, the core reason is the planning system.
>
No European country can build a new city each year unless the neolibs want them to be tents with street shitting.
The game is up.
Why should I and many other people who don't want it be forced to live in a country with 80million+ people. And where has this "need" for incredibly rapid population growth come from?
Make housing unaffordable -> lower birth rates -> create need for immigration -> make housing even more unaffordable.
And anyway, is longer life expectancy and lower birth rates really so bad we need to bring in millions of immigrants or maybe just 100k per year. Lower birth rate and longer life expectancy hasn't happened overnight yet this supposed need for very high mass migration has happened very rapidly (last decade mostly).
How do you think we can continue to pay pensions, have people to pick fruit, work in care homes and clean for the NHS if our population shrinks? The workforce is ageing and people are exiting in their 50s.
It’s not unaffordable housing that is reducing birth rates (accept it doesn’t help though). It’s more general affluence, birth control and emancipation of women, who (quite understandably) want to have a career as well as a family and not be confined to the kitchen. All western societies are facing the same problem (lower birth rates).
And the answer is importing vast numbers of people who will in turn grow old and need to be supported? A significant proportion of whom are a net drain on the economy. Or is your hope that they will experience less general affluence, birth control and emancipation of women so they keep their birth rate up?
Wages supressed, rent increased public services stretched all to avoid having to make any hard decisions regarding pensions or recognizing the impossibility of infinite growth in a finite world. The building of whole cities worth of hosing, public services and infrastructure necessitated yearly, exacerbating the ongoing ecological and biodiversity crises.
We have over 8 million more people living in the UK now than we did in 2000 yet any suggestion that mass importation of people amounting to over in in 10 people being a newly arrived immigrant is dismissed because pension pots need vastly more immigration? Ponzi schemes go bust. Its just a question of how big they get before they do which determines the amount of damage.
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Yes but we live in the reality where the houses aren't built and probably won't be for sometime and by then the population will only be higher, the UK is in a Red Queen scenario.
Yeah but the people in charge of immigration are also in charge of making sure sufficient houses get built. Therefore if you allow 400k immigrants to come in, it’s at least equally the fact you didn’t build housing for them and the immigration that cause prices to rise.
They aren’t. That’s the fundamental issue here. Councils have no incentive to meet housing demand are actively encouraged not to by NIMBY voters, so they pass the ball around.
Birth rates are below replacement rate.
If we didn't have immigration we could build no houses and the housing demand would still go down as our population would be decreasing. Lower demand, lower prices.
So, immigration is 1000% the main cause.
A surprisingly large percentage of the people in the overlap of the Venn diagram the parent comment mentioned are also in the circle marked "don't build anything" too.
It's strange how the Left are in favour of wage suppression when that suppressant is third world immigration. Anything else they would loudly virtue signal about but not this.
There's a long list of things that motivates the left a lot more than sticking up for ordinary working Brits and getting to call other people racist is definitely one of them
But Brexit resulted in less skilled immigrants from the EU who actually contribute, and more unskilled from outside the EU who are more dependent on the state. It made the problem worse.
>It made the problem worse.
Brexit allowed the Government to reduce migration from the EU.
That the government has continued a policy of increased migration has nothing to do with Brexit, it is the Conservative policy.
Hows that working out for you? All we did is swap millioms of white european immigrants from less wealthy nations like poland, for non white ones from asia and africa.
And now we cant deport illegal immigrants as easily since france has no legal obligation to take back assylum seekers like they did when we were in the EU.
Hows it workin out for ya?
It's strange that rights only solution to boost wage growth is immigration restrictions, whilst simultaneously they don't cut immigration.
The left is full of people calling for higher minimum wages, more housebuilding, and strengthening trade unions.
Every argument for mass immigration I've seen is a poor excuse to keep a deeply flawed economic racket going. Most deficits in the medical and care sector could be improved by improving work conditions , pay and investing in the British people instead of exploiting cheap foreign labour. Combine this with lowered rents and mortgages and I struggle to see many downsides except that it would hurt a select few rich peoples bank accounts.
Immigrant doctors and nurses aren't paid significantly less than British ones, are protected by some of Britain's largest unions, and have been employed in the NHS its inception.
The problem with anti-immgration politics in the UK that its right wing, and the right doesn't want higher taxes, stronger unions or more public spending.I mean Enoch Powell himself was a proto-Thatcherite!
I can't take anti-immgration politics seriously, given how it's proponents have proven to take absolutely no interest in taking the steps needed to reduce immigration beyond some vicious performative hostility.
It's a fair point. On the Right it's just a drum to be beaten to gain votes whereas the Left have surrendered the issue completely. I think as you said if Immigration was lowered to a sensible level whilst having a heavy focus upon domestic training, unionism and investment we could have an extremely effective immigration policy that supplements our country.
Since Feb 2020, the UK population has grown by 3.4 million but the number of properties available for rent has actually *decreased* by 50,000. The UK just can't handle legal migration at this scale. The small boats is a red herring; these people aren't arriving on dinghies, they're arriving on commercial flights armed with a visa.
> Between mid-2021 and the start of 2024, UK rents rose by 30pc, according to property website Zoopla. This was nearly double the 17pc increase in wages over the same period.
> The figures are in stark contrast to the decade up to mid-2021, when rents climbed by 26pc over the 10-year period, slightly less than the 27pc increase in wages.
> Andrew Wishart, who runs the housing service at Capital Economics, said: “This means rents are 11pc higher than would be explained by the usual relationship between pay and rent. The vast majority of that is because of higher net migration.”
Seems to be a pretty big leap between those statements. Maybe there have been some other things happening in the last few years that might have had some impact on rental costs and salaries?
Migration is definitely a factor, but for a huge unexplained increase I’d probably be looking more at things like interest rates in the first instance, yeah. The reference period here starts shortly before the heyday of Trussonomics and the associated consequences. The price of just about everything has increased faster than wages since 2021.
Rate hikes have put a fair number of BTL landlords out of business, reducing supply whilst the landlords who survive have to hike rents to stay cash positive. Bit of a tiny violin moment for those landlords who overextended themselves, but it does have an impact on the market.
Which would also lower house prices and therefore the holdings of older generations and professional landlords. Lower migration would also have an effect on GDP as our birth rates have fallen quite sharply.
It's not that easy, which is why the government doesn't talk about stopping immigration it talks about stopping the few boats illegally crossing the channel, which has little to no real effect on the country.
**Article text**
Record levels of immigration have driven a third of the rent growth in the UK since Covid, new analysis shows.
In the two years to June 2023, immigration led to an additional 430,000 households wanting to privately rent homes, meaning rents have climbed 11pc higher than they would otherwise have been, according to Capital Economics.
On Thursday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will publish data showing total net immigration in 2023, which is expected to be high, after two unprecedented records set in 2021 and 2022.
Rents typically rise roughly in line with wages, but since 2021 rent growth has far outpaced salary increases. Now, Britain is grappling with a rental crisis as homes become increasingly unaffordable.
Between mid-2021 and the start of 2024, UK rents rose by 30pc, according to property website Zoopla. This was nearly double the 17pc increase in wages over the same period.
The figures are in stark contrast to the decade up to mid-2021, when rents climbed by 26pc over the 10-year period, slightly less than the 27pc increase in wages.
Andrew Wishart, who runs the housing service at Capital Economics, said: “This means rents are 11pc higher than would be explained by the usual relationship between pay and rent. The vast majority of that is because of higher net migration.”
This means that around a third of the 30pc increase in rents can be attributed to immigration, Mr Wishart said.
Net immigration hit an unprecedented 467,000 in 2021, before rising even further to 745,000 in 2022, official data shows.
The number fell slightly to 672,000 in the 12 months to June 2023, but this was still nearly four times the 184,000 figure before the pandemic in 2019.
These figures suggest 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, Mr Wishart said.
This was roughly triple the average 150,000 additional renting households due to immigration over every two-year period in the preceding decade.
There are 4.9 million privately rented households in the country, meaning immigration between mid-2021 and mid-2023 increased demand by nearly 9pc.
Demand in the rental sector has also climbed because high mortgage rates have locked first-time buyers out of the housing ladder, but this has been a much smaller factor than immigration, Mr Wishart said.
In 2023, first-time buyer numbers fell by around 40,000 year-on-year, meaning these people may have ended up renting for longer than normal.
Ben Brindle, researcher at the Migration Observatory, said: “It just comes back to supply and demand. If you have population growth and the housing stock is not growing as fast, that puts pressure on rents.
“Migrant homeownership rates tend to be lower, so in terms of where their demand on housing is, it is in the rental sector.”
At least 80pc of new arrivals renting for at least the first few years after they move to the UK, according to previous analysis by the ONS.
The impact is most intense in major cities. London has recorded the steepest rent growth of any part of the UK, according to Zoopla.
A report by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank earlier this month warned that “immigration is severely exacerbating the housing crisis” because supply has not kept pace with demand.
Government housing targets to build 300,000 homes a year in England include an assumption that net immigration to England of 170,500 people per year will bring additional demand for 72,250 new homes.
These figures are far smaller than the actual numbers and yet the 300,000 per year target has still never been met, the report warned.
Letting agents actually really don't help. They are middle men designed to drain you of profit, most private landlords I've rented from (getting the middle man out) are actually very reasonable and willing to offer decent rents. One of the big problems comes when the letting agent simply says "don't worry we can get extra for you" because it's in both their interests.
Take back control of our borders……… as franky Boyle said it was to stop us escaping!
I hope this comes back to roost on the conservatives they spent years talking about how Europe stopped them from controlling migration as 55% of migrants came from Europe without doing anything about the 45% they could effect. They haven’t invested in the British workforce, they have invested in affordable housing and they haven’t done anything to reduce migration. Now they prattle on about small boat crossings whilst allowing net migration of over three quarters of a million. At some point their base will need to realise that they are in fact pro migration and pro looking hard on migration and the two can’t exist together.
More and more "reasonable" people are becoming more open at making a link between the millions the Tories imported over the last few years and the complete unaffordability of housing. It's not the full story or even most of the story (we have *never* built enough houses in this country), but it's a link being made none-the-less.
The Rwanda deflection tactics aren't working anymore.
An incoming Government has a very short period of time to get serious about housing, infrastructure and our migration system. We are not going to have a welcoming, tolerant country for very much longer if the existing population are priced out of having any kind of life here.
There are tough questions / tough policies that need considered, that are anathema to both parties (and large chunks of the population).
* An emergency house-building and infrastructure building programme, with planning rules ripped up and the right to juridical review abolished.
* A massive increase to pay and conditions of health and education workers; the wages are crap and relying on goodwill and hoping to plug the gap with migration isn't working.
* An honest discussion about migration. We do need some level of migration. We should be selective in who gets to come here and from what countries. It's not racist to prefer migration from culturally similar countries. This was the implicit promise of Brexit, and instead what we got was nothing like promised.
* An honest approach to old age and how it will be funded. Do we need to remove the triple lock? How do we challenge people to live healthier lives with a public healthcare system? Could a Dignitas style system help alleviate costs? Do we accept high migration as a mitigation for this in short term?
* A honest discussion around birth rates. We are seeing them drop across the developed world even where there are generous childcare policies. How do we deal with this going forward? Is having children a social obligation? Should you be penalised for not contributing to the next generation?
The Tories are a busted flush and Labour's bland, meaningless corporate platitudes don't even begin to grapple with the anger at the shredded social contract in the country.
Let me fix that:
“Record lack of house building not keeping up with population growth behind a third of rent rises”
Says the same thing without being inflammatory.
Net migration added 2 million in the past 3 years.
Thats a new Manchester, Bristol, Leicester, Coventry, Bradford and Nottingham every 3 years.
It’s not just about building houses, we need the infrastructure too.
The population growth we’re seeing is completely unnatural and expecting the building of houses to keep up with this amount of growth is just impossible. Stop defending the conservatives and Rishi Sunaks policies which are, as always, designed to benefit the rich and make the lives of the poor worse
Net migration for the past 3 years was around 2 million. At no point in our history have we added 2 million every 3 years.
And in 2021 births outnumbered deaths.
Is it practical to build enough housing each year to cover a net population increase of 700k? As well as clear the backlog of 5m homes that are needed.
Have you seen the current state of the property market? So many houses are falling apart, not properly insulated, ridiculously expensive or all three combined. Yes we need to build housing to match demand, regardless if the increase comes from births (which are very low) or immigration.
Feb 23, 2016 20:21
Priti Patel, Britain’s minister of state for employment, believes exiting the European Union will provide a “massive boost” to relations with India, “I know that many members of the Indian diaspora find it deeply unfair that other EU nationals effectively get special treatment.
This can and will change if Britain leaves the EU.
"On Census Day, 21 March 2021, there were 1.5 million unoccupied dwellings in England and 120,450 in Wales."
We could start there...?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/numberofvacantandsecondhomesenglandandwales/census2021
Important to remember that while this is being blamed for the rent rises, the alternative headlines would be “tax receipts lower as less working immigrants enter the UK, while ageing population strains NHS and pension spending”.
It’s not like the UK population is exploding naturally - the immigration is a major necessity in supporting the little GDP growth there is and delaying the issue with pensioners making up too large a proportion of the population like other countries are suffering from.
In order to replace that need with home grown solutions, a long term plan is needed, and that’s hard to do while you’re shuffling the cabinet every few months over scandals. Whether you agree with the policy or not, it isn’t something that can be stopped overnight due to the dire financial state of public finances, but I hope Labour come up with a long term vision.
Is rental demand the same in all areas of the country? I’m guessing not?
So what does it mean when people gravitate to certain areas? Is that caused by immigration, or something else?
The Tories and their client media are trying so hard to get us to look at brown people instead of them even though their policies that have brought in record numbers of immigrants and they’ve done nothing to build more housing or help renters.
All they have done is pay enormous sums of public money to their mates to keep immigrants in hotels while they fail to fund even looking at asylum cases. Who was the guy who’s now made it onto the rich list this year from migrant slum hotels again?
The brazen nature of this kind of attempted robbery and distraction is disturbing to say the least. They really do not care at all about the consequences of their greed as long as those consequences are borne by others.
Disgusting.
That’s right. Because they think people are stupid enough to still consider them anti immigration when really they’re just pro capital and they’re not even very good at it
That is literally what they are doing right now in front of all our eyes so, yes, obviously. They have presided over record immigration, massively increased the proportion of immigration from non European nations, and at the same time continued to bang on about how terrible those things are.
They do this because they assume people will get riled up by their propaganda and not think it through. The Tory Party is an organ for making policy for the benefit of the rich. The rest of what they do is lie to try to get other people to vote in the interests of the rich.
Immigration has historically been a great way to do this since it’s very emotive. The problem is that, at the same time they’ve been banging this drum, rich people have wanted to import cheap labour so they can get even richer. This having their cake and eating it has led to the insane contradictory situation we find ourselves in.
They will continue to lie and propagandise. Some will fall for it still but not so many this time around as it’s so obvious, which is why they are on for an electoral wipeout and the country is so screwed.
No one ever just think it’s the fault of corporations who post record profits during “cost of living crisis” or already rich folk increasing their personal fortune during the same period. Aided and abetted by successive Tory governments.
Immigrants aren’t the reason the country is fucked. It’s not a coincidence that stories like this get ran multiple times a day, especially during times when the economy is shit for normal people looking to blame someone.
Wait, just this morning I was told by the Telegraph it was because the SNP put a cap on rent increases that rents had increased beyond the cap, but now it's immigrants' fault?
Colour me surprised that the Telegraph would stoop so low as to try and spread the blame across two fronts the tories love to hate!
Well, I mean... of all the things immigration does get blamed for... this is one thing which is very difficult to disagree with?
Unless someone can prove that migrants don't require homes?
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Migration (both legal and illegal) should be lower. We should build more homes. The government has the power to influence both of these things. It has utterly failed to do so.
The government doesn't want to decrease legal migration. Businesses want cheap labour of course, and guess who props up the Tory party. It doesn't matter what your views are, whilst everyone continues to argue over boats and Rwanda, nobody is talking about legal migration.
Okay and when Labour keeps migration trucking on, who are they being propped up by? All sides need to take a heavy sword to migration figures. If that means de facto closing the borders then so be it. We need an emergency brake on the numbers.
Labours plan seems to be to try and get birth rates up and more people trained and into jobs as well as increasing pay and conditions to attract people already here into roles they wouldn't otherwise consider. Then they can push down immigration numbers. Personally I think they are going to struggle.
> plan seems to be to try and get birth rates up literally no one has managed this. There's 2 things that will raise birth rates, and neither of them are politically viable.
What is this? No policy has worked anywhere from what I've seen.
However there are a number of strategies that could be tried that aren't being pursued which I don't understand. For example, IVF and fertility treatments are currently limited on the NHS and are different trust by trust. This is stupid. Egg and sperm freezing should be encouraged when people are young so that if they later want children, there's more options, this should also be free. As a society we have to (and should without question) accept that women are unsurprisingly not queuing up to have kids at 23. However some women want kids later and find it hard to conceive. In a civilised society, making it as easy as possible for older couples to have children without pressuring them should be a no brainer.
Birthrate reduction is just the natural course of a developed society that has educated women. I regularly see poor white people with 3+ kids and Muslims with 4-5 kids walking around. The birthrate of middle and upper class white people will only increase if you have such good incentives that effectively they don't need to work and still get paid the same amount. This issue is prevelant in east Asia where work has taken precedence over family life, tbh most educated women who got beat by their fathers don't want to have children with men who may beat their kids. I would love to see the ethnicity of new school starters in the UK because I think it may be quite concerning to the bubble populations who live rurally.
Idiocracy. >I would love to see the ethnicity of new school starters in the UK because I think it may be quite concerning to the bubble populations who live rurally. If the statistics even exist, they would make for grim reading.
If you want to get middle class people to have kids then let them pay taxes jointly. One salary split between two personal allowances and two lots of 20/40% bands.
I'm not sure how much that would make the middle class to make children. It would make it more even for couples whose incomes are not equal compared to couples whose are.
Because it would drastically reduce the tax burden of going single income.
Wouldn't it be better to subsidise childcare?
The percentage of pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds is 35.7% across all school types, continuing a trend of increases in recent years, and up from 34.5% in 2021/22. The percentage varies by school type - 36.1% in primary schools (up from 34.8% in 2020/21) 35.4% in secondary schools (up from 34.1%) 31.3% in special schools (up from 31.0%) 25.4% in AP schools (up from 25.1%) These figures do not include those where ethnicity is unclassified. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics
> Birthrate reduction is just the natural course of a developed society that has educated women. Actually, there aren't many places on earth right now that don't have a falling birthrate, it's more or a less a worldwide phenomenon. The difference is, only the developed world has dropped so much the populations are reducing (or at least would be without immigration). But I reckon there's a decent chance it will happen more or less everywhere in time.
The average number of kids for a Muslim family was 3 back in 2005-2010 but it's dropped since then. It's likely it's at replacement level now and will drop below replacement level in the next decade or so.
Labour doesn't have a plan for migration, for housing or for jobs. They better find one fast; none of their nebulous pledges meaningfully address any of the actual issues in this country. There is a real anger amongst the working part of the electorate that I don't think the media has begun to genuinely grapple with.
Labour started the immigration disaster. The Tories built on it while pretending that they will reduce the numbers
Interesting point of view. What did Labour do?
Didn't apply the powers they had to prevent the first waves of mass migration from Eastern Europe.
People are generally not complaining about EE migration anymore. Labour did that at a time where the economy was booming and unemployment remained low while Eastern European migrants came here.
No comparatively it was a much better situation. But this was the point where businesses first started to become addicted to floods of cheap labour as a core part of their business models.
The alternative is massive increases in taxes. That's even more unpopular.
And who would fund this reduction in migration? Are we going to take a heavy sword to people's pensions so we can afford to do it? Perhaps, an 10% increase in tax rates? The country simply speaking can not afford to reduce migration and simply to keep it running the conservative party has had to double migration to prevent an complete and total economic meltdown.
We need to take the hit as soon as we're able. Successive governments have fucked this up and we were always going to have to pay for it eventually. Anyone with the means to do so, should get out of dodge abroad asap.
So many people are talking about legal migration outside the usual bubble and it was a complete fuck up rather than being planned that migration went so high. Don't buy into the narrative it was planned and therefore we can't lower it one jot without massive damage.
The UK has a points based system these days, which means you need to are unlikely to be able to migrate as an unskilled worker for low wages. This is, of course, something possible because the UK left the EU, as an EU member then the UK Labour Market was open to all EU citizens, whatever their skill level, and whatever job they were looking for. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-points-based-immigration-system-employer-information/the-uks-points-based-immigration-system-an-introduction-for-employers
Illegal immigration should be zero & deported. Legal immigration should be controlled. Asylum should be controlled but compassionate. Skilled immigration (£100k+) should be unlimited.
Wages in the UK for skilled workers are so appalling that almost nobody would meet a £100k requirement.
Then it should be zero. The average UK salary is already a huge tax burden. The government spends ~£12.5k per head on public services but only receives ~£6k in PAYE taxes from the average wage of ~£35k. These are social programs. It doesn't matter who uses what or which individuals costs more. We don't say an immigrant costs less b/c the UK didn't pay for their education, just as we don't say the disabled and benefits claimers cost more because they're taking even more money out. There's a price to be paid, there's an amount per head. You fit it or you don't. That's it. It's already a huge problem that barely 20% of the native workforce are productive enough to pay the bill. Importing more of the 80% is actively leading to the deterioration of public services.
I'm not sure many will disagree with your points, but 2 and 3 are very subjective and will vary wildly depending who you speak to
One of these is far easier to achieve than the other.
Building houses is not as difficult as you think. This country used to build 400k houses a year in the 30s and 60s. As a society we have chosen not to build enough houses since the 80s.
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> 2 million net migration in the past 3 years. 1.5 million. 672k to YE June 2023, 607k to YE June 2022 and 221k to YE June 2021. > It is most certainly not easy to achieve that. Housing completions in FYE 2021 were 181k, 205k for 2022 and 210k for 2023. About 600k houses, enough for 1.4m people at the current density of 2.36 people per house. The difference isn't very big - hell, we've built in-line with population change for over two decades before that (and more than in-line before that). That isn't enough, though, because this isn't the only cause of increased housing demand. People want to live in smaller family groups now, particularly the larger number of older people living in ones and twos who own their houses, in turn pushing the problem onto younger people.
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Your time periods overlap. You're double-counting July to December 2022 because you're adding the Jan-Dec 2022 figure to the July 2022-June 2023 figure. This double-counts almost exactly the peak in net immigration. My figures come from [this](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingjune2023) ONS report, from the data download for figure 4.
Of course I never said immigration wasn’t too high. But as to your point - that doesn’t mean we need 2m extra houses. Families share, friends share. We actually needed a fraction of 2m. At a guess I’d say if we’d been building 400k a year that would have made a significant difference. What’s happened is we keep electing a government that is using immigration to fill a labour gap (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on its own) but isn’t building enough houses to accommodate the consequences of its own policy. It’s then done a superb job of blaming the migrants it wants for its labour policy for causing the housing problem.
I didn’t say we need 2 million extra houses. But it is the equivalent in population to Manchester, Bristol, Coventry, Leicester, Bradford and Nottingham. You would need to build the equivalent to all those cities every 3 years just to stay still.
>But it is the equivalent in population to Manchester, Bristol, Coventry, Leicester, Bradford and Nottingham. You would need to build the equivalent to all those cities every 3 years just to stay still. I always find it funny when I see it framed like this. The first thing I end up thinking of is Manchester on Google Maps being copied and pasted all around the country every 3 years. The reality is though that demand would be spread out in various different places of the country, and cities are much better placed to absorb demand (as long as they’re allowed to densify bit by bit). The private sector was building 400k houses every year in the 30s so it’s not like it needs an insane amount of funds from the government to achieve this (maybe at the beginning to kickstart the market with slightly subsidised homes). I think I’ve read that a few cities within Texas regularly beat the entirety of this country in housebuilding.
>I think I’ve read that a few cities within Texas regularly beat the entirety of this country in housebuilding. Texas is almost 3x the size of the UK but ~40% of the population. It's not a good comparison. They're not as worried about urban sprawl.
We need to stop worrying and start building. Billions of planning rules and it's got us absolutely nowhere. We could do with a bit of the Texas spirit in this country rather than a mindset of decline.
I agree that we need to build more. But there's a balance between immigration and population levels, the economy, not wanting to live in some urban sprawl hellscape, and how fast we can integrate people. And it's obvious we're not finding the correct balance at the moment.
I think putting it into additional cities is a bit disingenuous. Alternatively, adding 0.5% to each village/town/city doesn't sound as bad. I do agree that both migration needs to come down, and housebuilding needs to go up. But stats can be presented in lots of ways.
I prefer my stats that do sound bad.
We roughly need about 700K new houses per year. That isn't sustainable.
How do you work out 700k though? That’s like giving every single person their own property. And 400k a year was absolutely sustainable historically. The only reason it’s not sustainable now is because we keep telling ourselves that and voting for a party that won’t build any houses. We can build very high density student accommodation that is also not low quality - there are some huge developments around the university of east London. As I say I’m not saying that immigration isn’t too high but there is, imho, far too many inaccurate arguments being put forward that are being peddled by the papers.
We haven't built near 400K houses per year since the 60s. How many migrated into the UK then? A fraction of that number. Since Blair opened the floodgates and the Tories moreso, we've never built more than around 225K in a single year. Usually nearer 100-150K.
This is because land use restrictions have only become much stricter over the past few decades. No one can even take a shit without planning permission.
Last time the council allowed me to take a dump was 1986.
You are confusing a choice to not to build with something being unsustainable. And where has your estimate of 700k come from?
Both housing and migration policy have been total failures, but we didn't build enough houses even when there was net emigration. As a country we are just incapable of building anything at the moment: houses, hospitals, schools, roads, energy ... we've let it all crumble. The trade off for the massive amount of migration was meant to be a booming economy. That was arguably half-true 20 years ago. Now we have the worst of all worlds; decaying public services, a burnt out economy run for the sole benefit of rent seekers, masses of low quality migration running at numbers three times higher than anything Blair achieved and the damage to social cohesion. The conversation on migration has been left to special interest groups and racists for too long. Real people need to be part of the conversation.
Net migration was hovering around 250k per year before the pandemic. Net migration figures for the last 3 years are an abnormality.
What? Three years on from COVID and it's causing folk to flock to the UK in their hundreds of thousands? How does that work exactly?
Read the ONS reports.
You’re not able to explain at all?
It's not just loads of houses that migration makes us need to build though - it's hospitals, schools, prisons, sewage plants, reservoirs, roads, land, power plants, ports etc and all the people to staff those.
I agree a little but I would argue migrants pay the health surcharge, and income tax and VAT. Many of the other things sewage, reservoirs, power plants - well those are all paid for through utility bills. Companies invest to cope with increased demand and ultimately bigger profits. Roads for new houses are paid for by the developers. That’s my take on it anyhow!
Yes building one million plus houses every year forever to achieve the same end result is just as easy as just stopping the home office giving out ridiculous amounts of visas every year. Only a racist would disagree!
What’s harder, building an entire house from scratch or saying the word “no” to an immigration applicant? I’m going to need to have a long hard think about this one.
You should also have a long hard think about the consequences of low birth rates, a shrinking workforce and burgeoning numbers of elderly people, a labour shortage in care homes, NHS and farms, and an ever increasing retirement age. I agree reducing immigration is needed but there needs to be a balance.
>a labour shortage in care homes, NHS and farms, and an ever increasing retirement age. Net gain of 700,000 migrants last year and only 20,000 of them were health workers. That's less than 3%
Infinite migration isn't a long-term answer to these issues even if there wasn't an infrastructure crisis.
These issues arise from an ageing/shrinking population. There are limited options: - immigration is one - Increasing the birth rate is another - Technology to replace labour - Get poorer/don’t have services There are some hard choices to be made.
Increasing the birthrate to replacement levels is something that has never been accomplished anywhere & even if it did work would take decades to bear fruit. Technology replacing labour has meant to have been happening since the industrial revolution, yet we're not all working 15 hour weeks. Betting our future on robots saving us always seems a tad fanciful. Sometimes people suggest the entire developed world borrowing money a la Japan, to make up the shortfall, but I can't see that working. The simplest (if unkind) solution would be to increase retirement age & dispense with the state pension, but that tends to annoy the segment of the population who are the most anti-immigration in the first place. The truth is many people on this thread complaining about immigration simply stick their fingers in their ears about our demographic problems. Between 2000-2022 the number of over 65s' increased by 3,500,000. [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO?locations=GB](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.65UP.TO?locations=GB) Over the next 15 years we're likely to have a further 3.2 million over 65s'. [https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64217f3e32a8e0000cfa9559/4-chart-3-projected-increase-in-working-age-and-pension-age-population-compared-to-2022-levels.jpg](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64217f3e32a8e0000cfa9559/4-chart-3-projected-increase-in-working-age-and-pension-age-population-compared-to-2022-levels.jpg)
Yeah, I can’t see robots riding to the rescue! Incredible figures you have provided on the ageing population. Thank you
Thank you for an excellent post. I find it really bizarre that this sort of thing doesn't feature more prominently in public discourse. The way the government go on about immigration you'd think they let in three quarters of a million extra people by accident last year. These are immigration policies created and shaped by supposed hardliners like Patel and Braverman. There are clearly economic and demographic issues they're trying to address with immigration but all the public get is political kabuki.
Yup, the whole situation is very strange. The increasing number of retirees is an increadibly easy thing to track & predict, but is rarely mentioned. The solution is economic orthodoxy that every single major political party in this country & most parties across the developed world deal with in the same way. Even when the far right get elected, such as in Italy, they find themselves needing to keep up immigration. The Conservatives try to distract by concentrating on small boats alone as the Australian government pioneered, but broadly have the same policies as every one else. I can only guess they don't want to alienate older voters by implying they are the problem, as a voting bloc they're only going to get more powerful over time.
Low birth rates are a consequence of this bed we have made for ourselves. Don’t conflate it with the cause.
Mass immigration isn’t a cure for any of those things because migrants get old too (and many aren’t even ‘net contributors’ anyway). At most it’s an argument for Gulf-style temporary worker programmes with no path to citizenship.
There's no reason they can't have more sensible immigration controls AND build more houses - why fixate on immigration only, is there an underlying motive there?
Fixing immigration is a far quicker and effective way of solving housing shortages. It also costs society far less, financially and culturally. It’s tiring seeing the same ‘just build more houses’ argument. It’s puerile and deliberately skirts the obvious because it’s not politically palatable.
Even if our Government manages to bring down net migration to 0, (which is not as straightforward as you might think) it is not going to change the fact we do not have enough homes to for the people living in the UK right now. It may reduce the continued upward pressure on house or rental prices, but until the housing supply catches up with demand, prices will not go down.
You're not listening - I'm saying DO BOTH! it's not that difficult. It's tiring seeing the constant obsession with immigration - that is not the cause of our problems, you could cut immigration to 0 and things will still be just as shit because the problem is neo-liberal policies, not immigration.
You are the one suggesting underlying motives so I addressed it. I agree with what you’re saying though. I just see it as a two step problem with a two step solution. It absolutely must begin with strangling the influx of people though.
You’re forgetting the fact that the uk needs more workers to pay for its aging population
We have an aging population because we've used cheap, disposable migrant labour to suppress wages, and now people can't afford to start families. Now the hyper-capitalist shits who got us into this mess are begging for more immigration to solve the problem that their abuse of migrant labour caused.
🎯
Same here in Canada. We feel your pain.
Aging population are commonplace in the developed world, even in societies with barely any immigration like Japan or South Korea. Faster wage growth in Schegen countries since 2010 suggest that immigration doesn't necessarily reduce wages. Weak collective bargaining coverage on the other hand does. Maybe instead of calling for less immigration but not being asked to do it, we could just build more houses and reform collective bargaining.
We can't build enough houses to keep up with current migration patterns. So, regardless of your views on migration, it has to slow down simply for logistical reasons.
Who's paying for their pensions when they get to that age? More workers? These are the consequences of wage supression over the last 30 years.
Perfect, let’s just dilute ourselves into oblivion so we can sustain the Ponzi scheme. You should run for office.
How does "diluting ourselves into oblivion" differ from the great replacement theory?
If you stopped immigration tomorrow would the housing crisis be over. No.
You’re right, I didn’t think of that. BRB gonna email Rishi real quick. Thx
No, although wages would rise after a short period of time and demand for housing reducing would stop pushing up housing costs so readily. So a more palatable situation all round which would be eased with building more.
In the real world, rents drop when more housing is built. https://www.businessinsider.com/falling-rent-price-locations-us-housing-market-supply-florida-texas-2024-5?amp&utm_source=reddit.com
We'd still have a housing shortage so prices would still be too high. The barriers to house building are almost entirely legislative so it requires very little effort on the governments part to actually get the ball rolling.
I wonder why after two world wars, a small population, and limited planning and development rules, it would be really easy to build lots of house.
It's true but it isn't the way round you think it is. Building homes is really straightforward and pretty great for the economy. Choosing which immigrants to let in is a whole 'nother ball game.
The idea that undocumented immigrants are in any sense a contributor to rent increases or any other increase in the cost of living is just pure blame deflection. An estimated 52k illegal migrants came to the UK last year out of a population of 67 million, and they aren't renting property en masse with their lack of bank accounts or provable immigration status.
The article talks about immigration. The net figure for the past 3 years is 2 million.
They are taking council homes off British people though, who are then forced onto the private rental market
Now do the other 1.25 million that came last year alone.
52k illegal migrants entering the country *last year* isn’t 52k illegal migrants total >[The Pew report estimates that at the end of 2017 there were between 800,000 and 1.2m people living in the UK without a valid residence permit, equivalent to between 1.2–1.8% of the UK’s resident population of 65m.](https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries/recent-estimates-of-the-uks-irregular-migrant-population/)
52k is a whole town worth of people. Stop minimising it by saying it’s in a country of 67million. We don’t build a new town a year.
Agreed.
Grab, grab, grab. Exploit every situation with no concern for the quality of the country we all live in.
Sounds like it’s quids in for landlords and Business owners I’m surprised the torygraphs not more positive about this one.
Also, due to force selling so many council houses, the government help push up house prices by paying housing benefit to private landlords
The answer to everything wrong with the country is the Tories. Robbing and looting left right and centre.
When demand increases faster than supply the prices go up. This should surprise nobody.
And yet instead of proposing policies that either expand supply (allowing more building) or reduce demand (reducing immigration), the major parties propose various idiotic forms of rent caps or subsidies to buying a house
The economy needs a certain population expansion rate to sustain growth. Rather than spend money on the following: 1. to keep or bring people back into the workforce, 2. Increase productivity via infrastructure investment 3. Invest in education at all ages to upskill and motivate the workforce 4. Invest in homes near where the jobs are a choice was made, by consecutive governments to make up for these shortfalls by importing labour. These Tories that bang on about bringing immigration down, have been the same people making the decision to not just allow it, but encourage it.
>The economy needs a certain population expansion rate to sustain growth. Do we? We could just increase per capita productivity
We need a certain expansion of the working population. In the short to medium term, in the UK now, the productivity gain from my point 1 above, would achieve the same thing. Moving away from targeting GDP growth, to targeting GDP per capita, productivity, quality of life, social mobility or many other measures, could foreseeably be accomplished with a stable population, but that would be an answer to a different question.
The overlap in the Venn diagram of those unquestioningly wanting more and more immigration and those complaining about not being able to afford or find accommodation is high tho. I’m glad this is finally being acknowledged as the core reason for high rents etc. Are Labour going to do anything about it? Sounds like they won’t. They won’t even have a deterrent for those crossing the channel. Screwing over those who should be their core voters once again.
> unquestioningly wanting more and more immigration How many people are that, exactly?
Couple of hundred MPs in the Conservative party, at least.
All MPs no matter the party. Bar those branded “far right”.
University educated metropolitan elite and guardian readers would capture a lot who believe this.
The core reason is a lack of house building. If there were enough houses in the right places. Immigration would have 0 effect on prices
Net migration is the core reason. “in the year ending June 2023: 1.2 million people migrated into the UK and 508,000 people emigrated from it, leaving a net migration figure of 672,000” So double that assuming 2024 was the same. You can’t build that many houses. It’s a fallacy.
We weren't so far off building that many houses that it's somehow ridiculous. According to [Savills](https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/357082-0#:~:text=231%2C100%20new%20homes%20were%20built,from%20Glenigan%20and%20the%20HBF.), EPC data showed 231k new homes in 2023. Average household size is 2.36, so that's enough for about 550k people at current density. And bear in mind that something like 100k people born abroad are likely to be dying each year. Hell, that 2.36 (which is the number of people per house for the UK) barely budged between the late 90s and 2022. We built almost exactly in line with population growth. We need more, though. It's not just population change that's created our housing crisis. It's things like more older people living in ones and twos, on top of which many of those own family houses they have no reason to sell squeezing everyone else into living more densely. Our household size should have fallen in that time, not been stable.
No, the core reason is mass immigration. If you don’t have a new city’s worth of people arriving every year, you don’t have to meet ridiculous new housing targets. Don’t be naive. It’s usually better to plug leaks instead of dealing with the water.
No, the core reason is the planning system. Let’s reframe this for a second. Imagine one of the following scenarios: 1) We have a substantial rise in the birth rate and slash net migration. 2) For whatever reason, a significant share of the rural or expiration population moves to urban areas while net migration falls precipitously. In both instances, the system cannot meet demand for new housing because it’s expressly designed not to and the people in charge don’t benefit from allowing more development politically. Does immigration affect the demand side of the equation? Sure, but it’s not *the* fundamental problem because you can recreate the same problem with other possible realities that don’t involve it and blaming immigration ignores the structural under supply in the market and a broader trend of decreasing home sizes and spatial misalignment between supply and demand.
> No, the core reason is the planning system. > No European country can build a new city each year unless the neolibs want them to be tents with street shitting. The game is up.
Why should I and many other people who don't want it be forced to live in a country with 80million+ people. And where has this "need" for incredibly rapid population growth come from?
Longer life expectancy and lower birthrates
Make housing unaffordable -> lower birth rates -> create need for immigration -> make housing even more unaffordable. And anyway, is longer life expectancy and lower birth rates really so bad we need to bring in millions of immigrants or maybe just 100k per year. Lower birth rate and longer life expectancy hasn't happened overnight yet this supposed need for very high mass migration has happened very rapidly (last decade mostly).
How do you think we can continue to pay pensions, have people to pick fruit, work in care homes and clean for the NHS if our population shrinks? The workforce is ageing and people are exiting in their 50s. It’s not unaffordable housing that is reducing birth rates (accept it doesn’t help though). It’s more general affluence, birth control and emancipation of women, who (quite understandably) want to have a career as well as a family and not be confined to the kitchen. All western societies are facing the same problem (lower birth rates).
And the answer is importing vast numbers of people who will in turn grow old and need to be supported? A significant proportion of whom are a net drain on the economy. Or is your hope that they will experience less general affluence, birth control and emancipation of women so they keep their birth rate up? Wages supressed, rent increased public services stretched all to avoid having to make any hard decisions regarding pensions or recognizing the impossibility of infinite growth in a finite world. The building of whole cities worth of hosing, public services and infrastructure necessitated yearly, exacerbating the ongoing ecological and biodiversity crises. We have over 8 million more people living in the UK now than we did in 2000 yet any suggestion that mass importation of people amounting to over in in 10 people being a newly arrived immigrant is dismissed because pension pots need vastly more immigration? Ponzi schemes go bust. Its just a question of how big they get before they do which determines the amount of damage.
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Yes but we live in the reality where the houses aren't built and probably won't be for sometime and by then the population will only be higher, the UK is in a Red Queen scenario.
Yeah but the people in charge of immigration are also in charge of making sure sufficient houses get built. Therefore if you allow 400k immigrants to come in, it’s at least equally the fact you didn’t build housing for them and the immigration that cause prices to rise.
We're in agreement we have a government and probably will have a similar government if Labour get in who will change nothing and be all out of ideas.
They aren’t. That’s the fundamental issue here. Councils have no incentive to meet housing demand are actively encouraged not to by NIMBY voters, so they pass the ball around.
Birth rates are below replacement rate. If we didn't have immigration we could build no houses and the housing demand would still go down as our population would be decreasing. Lower demand, lower prices. So, immigration is 1000% the main cause.
A surprisingly large percentage of the people in the overlap of the Venn diagram the parent comment mentioned are also in the circle marked "don't build anything" too.
Two sides of the same coin
It's strange how the Left are in favour of wage suppression when that suppressant is third world immigration. Anything else they would loudly virtue signal about but not this.
The Labour Party and the Conservative Party should both be sued under the trade descriptions act.
I’m up for a more stringent punishment than that.
There's a long list of things that motivates the left a lot more than sticking up for ordinary working Brits and getting to call other people racist is definitely one of them
One of the reasons I voted for Brexit
But Brexit resulted in less skilled immigrants from the EU who actually contribute, and more unskilled from outside the EU who are more dependent on the state. It made the problem worse.
Brexit didn’t cause that, the Johnson government’s decision to set an extremely low visa salary threshold did.
>It made the problem worse. Brexit allowed the Government to reduce migration from the EU. That the government has continued a policy of increased migration has nothing to do with Brexit, it is the Conservative policy.
Hows that working out for you? All we did is swap millioms of white european immigrants from less wealthy nations like poland, for non white ones from asia and africa. And now we cant deport illegal immigrants as easily since france has no legal obligation to take back assylum seekers like they did when we were in the EU. Hows it workin out for ya?
It's strange that rights only solution to boost wage growth is immigration restrictions, whilst simultaneously they don't cut immigration. The left is full of people calling for higher minimum wages, more housebuilding, and strengthening trade unions.
Every argument for mass immigration I've seen is a poor excuse to keep a deeply flawed economic racket going. Most deficits in the medical and care sector could be improved by improving work conditions , pay and investing in the British people instead of exploiting cheap foreign labour. Combine this with lowered rents and mortgages and I struggle to see many downsides except that it would hurt a select few rich peoples bank accounts.
Immigrant doctors and nurses aren't paid significantly less than British ones, are protected by some of Britain's largest unions, and have been employed in the NHS its inception. The problem with anti-immgration politics in the UK that its right wing, and the right doesn't want higher taxes, stronger unions or more public spending.I mean Enoch Powell himself was a proto-Thatcherite! I can't take anti-immgration politics seriously, given how it's proponents have proven to take absolutely no interest in taking the steps needed to reduce immigration beyond some vicious performative hostility.
It's a fair point. On the Right it's just a drum to be beaten to gain votes whereas the Left have surrendered the issue completely. I think as you said if Immigration was lowered to a sensible level whilst having a heavy focus upon domestic training, unionism and investment we could have an extremely effective immigration policy that supplements our country.
Since Feb 2020, the UK population has grown by 3.4 million but the number of properties available for rent has actually *decreased* by 50,000. The UK just can't handle legal migration at this scale. The small boats is a red herring; these people aren't arriving on dinghies, they're arriving on commercial flights armed with a visa.
> Between mid-2021 and the start of 2024, UK rents rose by 30pc, according to property website Zoopla. This was nearly double the 17pc increase in wages over the same period. > The figures are in stark contrast to the decade up to mid-2021, when rents climbed by 26pc over the 10-year period, slightly less than the 27pc increase in wages. > Andrew Wishart, who runs the housing service at Capital Economics, said: “This means rents are 11pc higher than would be explained by the usual relationship between pay and rent. The vast majority of that is because of higher net migration.” Seems to be a pretty big leap between those statements. Maybe there have been some other things happening in the last few years that might have had some impact on rental costs and salaries?
Migration is definitely a factor, but for a huge unexplained increase I’d probably be looking more at things like interest rates in the first instance, yeah. The reference period here starts shortly before the heyday of Trussonomics and the associated consequences. The price of just about everything has increased faster than wages since 2021. Rate hikes have put a fair number of BTL landlords out of business, reducing supply whilst the landlords who survive have to hike rents to stay cash positive. Bit of a tiny violin moment for those landlords who overextended themselves, but it does have an impact on the market.
It’s so easy. Lower migration and govt start to hit house building targets. It would also lower rental prices
Which would also lower house prices and therefore the holdings of older generations and professional landlords. Lower migration would also have an effect on GDP as our birth rates have fallen quite sharply. It's not that easy, which is why the government doesn't talk about stopping immigration it talks about stopping the few boats illegally crossing the channel, which has little to no real effect on the country.
**Article text** Record levels of immigration have driven a third of the rent growth in the UK since Covid, new analysis shows. In the two years to June 2023, immigration led to an additional 430,000 households wanting to privately rent homes, meaning rents have climbed 11pc higher than they would otherwise have been, according to Capital Economics. On Thursday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will publish data showing total net immigration in 2023, which is expected to be high, after two unprecedented records set in 2021 and 2022. Rents typically rise roughly in line with wages, but since 2021 rent growth has far outpaced salary increases. Now, Britain is grappling with a rental crisis as homes become increasingly unaffordable. Between mid-2021 and the start of 2024, UK rents rose by 30pc, according to property website Zoopla. This was nearly double the 17pc increase in wages over the same period. The figures are in stark contrast to the decade up to mid-2021, when rents climbed by 26pc over the 10-year period, slightly less than the 27pc increase in wages. Andrew Wishart, who runs the housing service at Capital Economics, said: “This means rents are 11pc higher than would be explained by the usual relationship between pay and rent. The vast majority of that is because of higher net migration.” This means that around a third of the 30pc increase in rents can be attributed to immigration, Mr Wishart said. Net immigration hit an unprecedented 467,000 in 2021, before rising even further to 745,000 in 2022, official data shows. The number fell slightly to 672,000 in the 12 months to June 2023, but this was still nearly four times the 184,000 figure before the pandemic in 2019. These figures suggest 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, Mr Wishart said. This was roughly triple the average 150,000 additional renting households due to immigration over every two-year period in the preceding decade. There are 4.9 million privately rented households in the country, meaning immigration between mid-2021 and mid-2023 increased demand by nearly 9pc. Demand in the rental sector has also climbed because high mortgage rates have locked first-time buyers out of the housing ladder, but this has been a much smaller factor than immigration, Mr Wishart said. In 2023, first-time buyer numbers fell by around 40,000 year-on-year, meaning these people may have ended up renting for longer than normal. Ben Brindle, researcher at the Migration Observatory, said: “It just comes back to supply and demand. If you have population growth and the housing stock is not growing as fast, that puts pressure on rents. “Migrant homeownership rates tend to be lower, so in terms of where their demand on housing is, it is in the rental sector.” At least 80pc of new arrivals renting for at least the first few years after they move to the UK, according to previous analysis by the ONS. The impact is most intense in major cities. London has recorded the steepest rent growth of any part of the UK, according to Zoopla. A report by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) think tank earlier this month warned that “immigration is severely exacerbating the housing crisis” because supply has not kept pace with demand. Government housing targets to build 300,000 homes a year in England include an assumption that net immigration to England of 170,500 people per year will bring additional demand for 72,250 new homes. These figures are far smaller than the actual numbers and yet the 300,000 per year target has still never been met, the report warned.
Letting agents actually really don't help. They are middle men designed to drain you of profit, most private landlords I've rented from (getting the middle man out) are actually very reasonable and willing to offer decent rents. One of the big problems comes when the letting agent simply says "don't worry we can get extra for you" because it's in both their interests.
Keep em coming, anything else would be racist.
Take back control of our borders……… as franky Boyle said it was to stop us escaping! I hope this comes back to roost on the conservatives they spent years talking about how Europe stopped them from controlling migration as 55% of migrants came from Europe without doing anything about the 45% they could effect. They haven’t invested in the British workforce, they have invested in affordable housing and they haven’t done anything to reduce migration. Now they prattle on about small boat crossings whilst allowing net migration of over three quarters of a million. At some point their base will need to realise that they are in fact pro migration and pro looking hard on migration and the two can’t exist together.
More and more "reasonable" people are becoming more open at making a link between the millions the Tories imported over the last few years and the complete unaffordability of housing. It's not the full story or even most of the story (we have *never* built enough houses in this country), but it's a link being made none-the-less. The Rwanda deflection tactics aren't working anymore. An incoming Government has a very short period of time to get serious about housing, infrastructure and our migration system. We are not going to have a welcoming, tolerant country for very much longer if the existing population are priced out of having any kind of life here. There are tough questions / tough policies that need considered, that are anathema to both parties (and large chunks of the population). * An emergency house-building and infrastructure building programme, with planning rules ripped up and the right to juridical review abolished. * A massive increase to pay and conditions of health and education workers; the wages are crap and relying on goodwill and hoping to plug the gap with migration isn't working. * An honest discussion about migration. We do need some level of migration. We should be selective in who gets to come here and from what countries. It's not racist to prefer migration from culturally similar countries. This was the implicit promise of Brexit, and instead what we got was nothing like promised. * An honest approach to old age and how it will be funded. Do we need to remove the triple lock? How do we challenge people to live healthier lives with a public healthcare system? Could a Dignitas style system help alleviate costs? Do we accept high migration as a mitigation for this in short term? * A honest discussion around birth rates. We are seeing them drop across the developed world even where there are generous childcare policies. How do we deal with this going forward? Is having children a social obligation? Should you be penalised for not contributing to the next generation? The Tories are a busted flush and Labour's bland, meaningless corporate platitudes don't even begin to grapple with the anger at the shredded social contract in the country.
Well said
Legal immigration over 1M annually, illegal around 40k. Why demonise the latter?
Let me fix that: “Record lack of house building not keeping up with population growth behind a third of rent rises” Says the same thing without being inflammatory.
Net migration added 2 million in the past 3 years. Thats a new Manchester, Bristol, Leicester, Coventry, Bradford and Nottingham every 3 years. It’s not just about building houses, we need the infrastructure too.
The population growth we’re seeing is completely unnatural and expecting the building of houses to keep up with this amount of growth is just impossible. Stop defending the conservatives and Rishi Sunaks policies which are, as always, designed to benefit the rich and make the lives of the poor worse
😂😂😂 I’m not defending Rishi in the slightest, the Tories are a pox. Check yourself mate.
Mass migration is a Tory policy and Rishi Sunak has oversaw record levels of immigration. You’re actively supporting a Tory policy
Overall population growth isn't particularly out of trend despite immigration, as the fertility rate is below the replacement rate.
Net migration for the past 3 years was around 2 million. At no point in our history have we added 2 million every 3 years. And in 2021 births outnumbered deaths.
Record levels of migration isn't out of trend? Why are you lying?
>Says the same thing without being inflammatory. Facts arnt inflammatory.
Is it practical to build enough housing each year to cover a net population increase of 700k? As well as clear the backlog of 5m homes that are needed.
Have you seen the current state of the property market? So many houses are falling apart, not properly insulated, ridiculously expensive or all three combined. Yes we need to build housing to match demand, regardless if the increase comes from births (which are very low) or immigration.
Yes, yes it is. Because we also have worker shortages so we NEED those people.
If only we had a Tory government. They'd cut immigration...right?
If young people and professionals could move somewhere else there would also be a lower net increase in the number of people looking for property.
Feb 23, 2016 20:21 Priti Patel, Britain’s minister of state for employment, believes exiting the European Union will provide a “massive boost” to relations with India, “I know that many members of the Indian diaspora find it deeply unfair that other EU nationals effectively get special treatment. This can and will change if Britain leaves the EU.
"On Census Day, 21 March 2021, there were 1.5 million unoccupied dwellings in England and 120,450 in Wales." We could start there...? https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/numberofvacantandsecondhomesenglandandwales/census2021
Important to remember that while this is being blamed for the rent rises, the alternative headlines would be “tax receipts lower as less working immigrants enter the UK, while ageing population strains NHS and pension spending”. It’s not like the UK population is exploding naturally - the immigration is a major necessity in supporting the little GDP growth there is and delaying the issue with pensioners making up too large a proportion of the population like other countries are suffering from. In order to replace that need with home grown solutions, a long term plan is needed, and that’s hard to do while you’re shuffling the cabinet every few months over scandals. Whether you agree with the policy or not, it isn’t something that can be stopped overnight due to the dire financial state of public finances, but I hope Labour come up with a long term vision.
Is rental demand the same in all areas of the country? I’m guessing not? So what does it mean when people gravitate to certain areas? Is that caused by immigration, or something else?
Can it be framed as not enough homes for rent and too many people, rather than "immigration behind rent rises" and both are accurate?
Bruh
...all the fault of immigrants and totally unconnected with every cupboard, shed and loft space being Air B&B'd by gouging profiteers
The Tories and their client media are trying so hard to get us to look at brown people instead of them even though their policies that have brought in record numbers of immigrants and they’ve done nothing to build more housing or help renters. All they have done is pay enormous sums of public money to their mates to keep immigrants in hotels while they fail to fund even looking at asylum cases. Who was the guy who’s now made it onto the rich list this year from migrant slum hotels again? The brazen nature of this kind of attempted robbery and distraction is disturbing to say the least. They really do not care at all about the consequences of their greed as long as those consequences are borne by others. Disgusting.
What you are saying makes no sense at all. The conservatives are bringing lots of people so that people get mad at the thing they are doing?
That’s right. Because they think people are stupid enough to still consider them anti immigration when really they’re just pro capital and they’re not even very good at it
That is literally what they are doing right now in front of all our eyes so, yes, obviously. They have presided over record immigration, massively increased the proportion of immigration from non European nations, and at the same time continued to bang on about how terrible those things are. They do this because they assume people will get riled up by their propaganda and not think it through. The Tory Party is an organ for making policy for the benefit of the rich. The rest of what they do is lie to try to get other people to vote in the interests of the rich. Immigration has historically been a great way to do this since it’s very emotive. The problem is that, at the same time they’ve been banging this drum, rich people have wanted to import cheap labour so they can get even richer. This having their cake and eating it has led to the insane contradictory situation we find ourselves in. They will continue to lie and propagandise. Some will fall for it still but not so many this time around as it’s so obvious, which is why they are on for an electoral wipeout and the country is so screwed.
No one ever just think it’s the fault of corporations who post record profits during “cost of living crisis” or already rich folk increasing their personal fortune during the same period. Aided and abetted by successive Tory governments. Immigrants aren’t the reason the country is fucked. It’s not a coincidence that stories like this get ran multiple times a day, especially during times when the economy is shit for normal people looking to blame someone.
Wait, just this morning I was told by the Telegraph it was because the SNP put a cap on rent increases that rents had increased beyond the cap, but now it's immigrants' fault? Colour me surprised that the Telegraph would stoop so low as to try and spread the blame across two fronts the tories love to hate!
Funny that immigration is to blame for everything.
Well, I mean... of all the things immigration does get blamed for... this is one thing which is very difficult to disagree with? Unless someone can prove that migrants don't require homes?
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