Nathan Gower

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The headline is pretty arresting, but don't stop there. When you actually read the story, it's talking about something quite different. How so? So that headline sounds to me at least like half of the new homes that are being built are earmarked to go to migrants. Agreed, it does sound like that. But that's not what's going on at all. There's nothing in the story about new housing being assigned to migrants. Hmm.

So what is the story actually about? It's based on an analysis made by the Conservative Party. I wanted to know how they came up with their figures, so last Wednesday I called them up and they told me to send them an email. And what was their reply? Well, they didn't reply, so the next day I sent another email. Did you get a reply to that? Nope, but I called again and they said they had seen the email and would get back to me. Did they? I've emailed them every day since then and had no reply. Surely not every day? Every day, including Sunday.

Did there ever come a point, Nathan, when you decided you were going to get off email and do the work yourself? Yeah, Monday morning. Okay, here goes. First, the Conservatives take government figures on the number of new homes that have been built in England since the Labour Party came to power in July 2024. That's about 275,000 homes. Then, they take figures for net migration since Labour came to power. Basically, the addition to the population due to migration.

He sanovat, että se on noin 310 000. Tämä näyttää olevan heidän omaa arviointiaan, koska tämä kuva ei ole oikeasti lopetettu.

Mutta sitten he yrittävät tarkastella, kuinka monta asiaa nämä emigrantit olisivat tarkastaneet. He arvioivat, että se olisi 2,36 emigranttia per asia. Se on yleinen kansainvälinen asukasivu. Tämä tarkoittaisi emigrantit, jotka omistavat noin 130 000 asiaa. 130 000 on tietenkin vain yli puoli 275 000, joten se on puoli.

So from what you're saying, this whole story isn't about future houses or future migration. It's about homes that have already been built and migration that's already happened. Correct. But even more importantly, there's nothing here about half of these homes being either occupied by or reserved for new migrants. Also, these aren't all social housing where councils make decisions about who gets them, only a small fraction are.

So basically, if migrants wanted to live in one of these houses, in the vast majority of cases, they'd have to compete for them on the open market, alongside people already in the UK. That's despite what the shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp is quoted as saying in the article. This is what uncontrolled immigration looks like. Nearly half of all homes Labour delivers vanish before a British family gets a look in.

So the Conservatives are criticising Labour because a hefty increase in immigration has eaten into the extra housing supply added since it came to power. Nathan, what were the numbers like in the Conservative years? Let's start with house building. So in the last parliament, under the Conservatives, they added between roughly 220,000 and 235,000 homes a year. That's marginally higher than the most recent annual figure, most of which was under Labour.

But under the Conservatives, migration levels were much, much higher. For example, in the last parliament, net migration peaked at 944,000 in 2022-23. For Labour, the most recent annual figure is 171,000.

Using the same logic and the same occupancy rate as the Conservatives did, for the last four financial years from 2020 to 2024, more than 100% of the new supply of homes in the last Conservative Parliament would have vanished due to demand from immigration.

It seems a bit cheeky for the conservatives to criticize labor for something that was worse under the last conservative government. You might say that. James Riding is living market and sustainability editor at the magazine Inside Housing. He thinks that to imply that half of all new build homes are going to immigrants is disingenuous.