06/06/2026
Why immigration is NOT the ultimate cause of the housing crisis 👇
While 2 thirds of population growth is from migration, the other third is from our aging population (something to be celebrated!).
If we just had that one third population expansion through an aging population increase, we'd have an even worse housing crisis, because with a broken economy and labour shortages we'd be in a worse position to build more homes:
The economy is what keeps you in work, food on your table and a roof over your head.
As I'm sure you'll understand, if millions of people suddenly stop working, it costs us. It doesn't matter if that is "unemployment" or "retirement", it costs all of us in tax, and services become under resourced.
However, with retirement we not only need to cover this loss to the economy, but older people need more support, that support needs money and people to a ratio of 3.5 to 1. The younger you get, the lower that ratio is.
Normally our birth rate would partly cover this, but we simultaneously have a declining birth rate, so our need to put young people in the economy from abroad is even higher.
Migrants are overwhelmingly young and statistically far more likely to be in work than UK born citizens.
Without those migrants, your tax bill would be higher because they wouldn't be paying tax as well to help care for the elderly and run every day needs. The cost of goods and services would also be astronomical because under the principle of supply & demand, labour shortages drive up prices. So a lot of people simply wouldn't be able to afford housing because of the legacy of policies to sell off social housing stocks.
You can argue that if migrants hadn't come there would be millions of houses available, but without those migrants, many of those extra houses simply wouldn't be there at all, meanwhile the country would be in such a state of crisis that housing would be the least of our concerns anyway.
Either way, migrants are responding to a demand for labour. This was promoted by the Conservative government in particular because they knew how essential it was, while simultaneously trying to keep certain voters on side by complaining about 'boats', which made up 2% of immigration at the time and is a problem made more complex because of that government's own backwards policy on banning overseas asylum applications (something that would save us £5bn each year through not needing hotels/HMOs for temporary housing).
