Successive British governments have been accused of misleading the public on mass migration’s effect on the housing crisis, in a report revealing migrants headed 90 per cent of new households in England over the past decade.
Presenting its new report on the subject, Migration Watch UK said Communities Secretary Sajid Javid’s claim that “two thirds of housing demand has nothing to do with immigration; it is to do with natural population growth”, was “entirely false and misleading”.
The minister’s claim was based on the government’s projection that between 2014 and 2049 Britain will need homes for 210,000 new households a year, of which it said 77,000 will be down to immigration, and the remaining 133,000 resulting from future family formation by the existing population.
But the projection “seriously understates the true impact of immigration on housing demand”, according to Migration Watch’s report, which notes that not only does the government model its figures on the assumption that future net migration will be much lower than today, it also ignores the effect of migrants already living in Britain.