Sue Lukes suggests some clear lines to counter a right wing narrative.

“But they have to stop migration: the country is full, there isn’t enough housing” is a line you may hear on the doorstep during the General Election campaign. Rather than walk away, it’s sensible to recognise that most voters have good reason to be fearful about housing. Here are some useful points to introduce into the conversation.

1. Let’s be clear: there is no shortage of actual housing in the UK.  The 2011 census showed that one-third of the bedrooms on the night it was taken were unoccupied.  Even in London, 92,000 bedrooms were unoccupied that night.  So there’s no shortage of actual homes.  The issue is who gets to occupy them -a problem which is nothing to do with migration.
2. Who decides that those homes stay empty or underoccupied? The owners and also the landlords. Between 2004 and 2014, private landlords saw their wealth increase by £434bn and yet they make up only 2% of the population.
3. So the problem is not space or how much housing we have, it is who owns it and what they do with it. 
4. More and more accommodation has moved from the social sector into the private sector.  In 1979, there were 6.5 million council homes; now there are 2.2 million, while 4.4m households rent privately, twice as many as 15 years ago.  So ‘the market’ decides who gets that housing and landlords rent it for the highest prices they can.  They get a massive subsidy for that: the estimated annual cost of housing benefit is now £23.4bn, more than the total running costs of government departments, including the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Transport.
5. There are now 11 million people living in precarious rented homes which could be taken from them at any time. Between 2011 and 2018 rents grew by 16%, wages by only 10%. On average, renters spend one-third of their pre-tax income on rent.
6. The waiting list for social housing in England stands at 1.6m. 
7. But many migrants and most recently arrived ones are not on that list.  90% of new lettings go to UK nationals because access to council waiting lists is not open to most new migrants, for example most people with limited leave.
8. Asylum seekers cannot get social housing, and because the government has created an enormous backlog of people waiting for a decision (by not deciding their cases, not because of significant increases in numbers) and they are not allowed to work or claim benefits until they get that decision, they have to live somewhere.  Instead of sorting out the backlog, the government has paid private providers vast amounts of money to put them in hotels and other places.  This is not housing that people actually want: sharing a room with a stranger, no kitchen, often terrible food, poor facilities if any, often infested, and it is provided at a vast cost of £3.1 billion last year.  It’s no surprise that the owner of one of the firms the Home Office contract with made it to the list of the 200 richest people in the UK this year.
9. And if you want to be really afraid  some of these Home Office contractors have made no secret of the fact they would like to get into the ‘social housing market’ and exploit everyone else like they exploit asylum seekers, using our money. 

Activists should feel upbeat about these debates. The flights of asylum seekers to Rwanda will not take place now. Although other election coverage of party positions on the migration issue has not always been edifying, the stopping of these deportation flights constitutes a real victory. Happy canvassing!

Sue Lukes was an Islington Labour Councillor from 2018 to 2022 and is a writer and consultant on migration issues.

Image: Migrants welcome here GJN banner. Author: Global Justice Now, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.