Why mass immigration explains the housing crisis

Ever since Theresa May’s clarion address of the UK’s housing shortage (and how many successive PMs have embarked on the same brave heave-ho?) countless comment pieces have addressed the real problem that drives the disjunction between supply and demand. Nimbyism. Complex, protracted planning permission. Developer land banking. Rich Chinese and Russians investing in unoccupied properties as three-dimensional bank accounts. Excessive protection of green belts. Second homeowners. Empty properties the state should confiscate. The catastrophic sell-off of social housing. A wilful confusion about what the word ‘affordable’ means.

Yet when two statistics are out of whack, it behoves us to look at them both. All the above dysfunctions regard supply. Which suggests there’s something awkward about looking instead at demand.

At a Radio 3 Free Thinking event last weekend, I all but came to blows with my panel’s ‘rational optimist’, who believes that continued human population growth will be both modest and benign. The moment I mentioned the inevitable pressures on Europe of mass migration, the poor gentleman exploded, as if I’d tripped the pin on one of those grenades cropping up on the dodgier streets of Sweden. Something about how we screwed up in Libya, and the needs of the NHS… Give the guy this, he did rouse righteous applause from the great and the good progressives who attend events at the Sage Gateshead in Newcastle.

But let’s look at this housing business. It took half a century for the UK population to rise from 50.3 million in 1950 to 59.1 million in 2000. During that period, the foreign-born population rose from 4.3 per cent to 8.8 per cent — so a measure of that increase was already accounted for by newcomers. After an inflow historically unprecedented for this country, this brief century alone has seen the UK population shoot up to 65.6