‘Homes fit for heroes’ was the promise made by politicians to those returning from the horrors of World War One. It was a promise that was initially broken by the politicians who uttered it and it took until the post World War Two period for Britain to engage in the creation of enough social housing to accommodate all the Britons which required such housing.

Fast forward to today and social housing is in extremely short supply. We don’t have the available land nor the finances to build social housing in the amounts that Britain was able to build in the 1950’s. For many Britons the prospect of being housed in social housing where the rents are much lower than in the private sector is almost an impossible dream. Those who get social housing often have to wait years and years for the chance of being allocated a property.

In addition to this long wait for housing a shift by councils from priority based on length of time waiting to the ‘needs’ of the prospective tenant has also made social housing unattainable for many Britons. From talking to those who’ve been through this process in many areas you can only get a social housing allocation if you are disabled, have children with special needs or you are able to come up with a cocktail of special circumstances, either real or highly exaggerated, that can be presented to the council and which tick council housing departments priority boxes.

Another way to get prioritised for council or other social housing is to be a migrant. Although migrants are a minority of the population, people from this demographic are, as Patrick O’Flynn reveals in an excellent post on his Substack, disproportionally housed in social and council housing.

Some of the figures that Mr O’Flynn reveals are shocking and show that the claims by open borders advocates that migrants are not taking up scarce council housing is are dishonest ones. Mr O’Flynn, quoting from figures supplied by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory said that members of the majority population have very similar amounts of people in social housing as those who are foreign born. Mr O’Flynn said that 16% of the majority British born population are in social housing but 17% of those who are foreign born are also in social housing. In effect there might be less foreign born people in the UK but they take up more social housing than UK born Britons. Breaking down this headline figure it can be seen that some demographics such as those from Pakistani and Sub-Saharan Africa in places like London have very high occupancy rates for social housing, with 24% and 40% of members of these groups being housed in social housing.

Mr O’Flynn states that this reflects the type of migrants that Britain has been accepting. The high take up of social housing by those who are foreign born does indicate that those migrants are not the go getting high achievers that Britain needs. If they were the high achievers and the sort of migrant that wanted to contribute to the UK then they would be renting privately or buying property, not occupying social housing.

Mr O’Flynn said:

…..it cannot be a good idea to import people from other nations to take up social housing in the UK ahead of our own citizens. And given all we hear from the pro-mass migration zealots about the alleged economic boon provided, one would expect to find a very low take-up rate for social housing among migrant groups.

That’s a very good point. If those arriving in the UK from overseas were really the doctors, engineers and future business leaders that the pro-mass migration types tell us that they are then they would not be housed in properties primarily designed for those who can’t afford private rent or can’t afford to buy a property.

Mr O’Flynn added:

But the real eye-opener comes when one looks at the breakdown of the social housing uptake of different migrant groups. While only six per cent of Indian-born people are in social housing, an astonishing 30 per cent of sub-Saharan African migrants in the UK live in social housing. That rises to a frankly preposterous 40 per cent in London – the most expensive city in Europe for housing. So while many UK families have been forced to leave the capital city they were born in due to housing costs, a big chunk of its social housing stock has been turned over to those arriving from other countries.

How can that be remotely economically justifiable, let alone accord to anyone’s idea of treating our own UK-born national citizens fairly?

Though sub-Saharan Africans lead the way, there are other foreign-born groups with a greater than average social housing occupation rate, including those born in Pakistan.

This is utter and complete madness. It is, as Mr O’Flynn said, neither economically justifiable nor fair. What we have is a situation where low skilled and therefore low earning people are rocking up in the UK and subsequently taking up housing that should have been for local British people. It’s all too easy for a migrant to play the downtrodden victim and therefore go up the priority list for public housing thereby removing a property from being used for housing a British born person. These migrants are often so low skilled and of such poor potential as workers that they can’t afford to buy and can’t afford to rent privately, so they end up being housed in social housing.

Low skill immigration is not a benefit, it’s a cost as has been seen elsewhere. Mr O’Flynn quotes some pretty worrying figures from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands about the cost of different types of migrant. Their study into the costs of migration found that those each migrant who came to the Netherlands on work visas contributed on average of £110,000 to the Dutch economy but for cases involving family reunification, asylum seeking and for migrants from the Horn of Africa there’s no profit, only loss. Family reunification costs the Dutch state and therefore the Dutch people, the UK equivalent, based on today’s exchange rates, £242,500 per individual, asylum seeking individuals £419,000 and migrants from the Horn of Africa an astounding £529,000. That’s not collectively, that’s each!

If you look at the Dutch study figures and set them next to the high figures of public housing take up by migrants then it becomes all too likely that the United Kingdom might have similar negative migration cost figures as has been found in the Netherlands. When you consider just how many low skilled and non-contributory individuals from places like Pakistan and Sub-Saharan Africa are occupying public housing in the UK then this really does look like a significant cost. Because this cohort of migrants can’t afford to pay for any other sort of housing, then it’s very possible that the 64% of Pakistanis and Sub-Saharan Africans who are living in social housing in London, must be costing the economy Billions of pounds. Because they are on such low incomes or even on benefits, then they are obviously not contributing any significant amount of money to the economy.

I agree with Mr O’Flynn in that we need to radically change both our migration systems and our social housing allocation system, either by, as Mr O’Flynn said, banning foreign born people from accessing public housing or having a system of ‘citizen preference’ for social housing allocation. The situation is indeed as Mr O’Flynn said, ‘ludicrous’.

I would strongly advise readers to go and read the entirety of Mr O’Flynn’s piece as it is a real eye-opener on the costs of low skilled migration both on a baseline economic level and in terms of how mass numbers of unskilled and indeed unnecessary migrants, are in some areas eating up resources that they have not contributed to and probably never will.