Britain’s housing market is a mess. The system yields arbitrary gains for some, locks out others, puts pressure on (especially) young people’s real incomes due to high rental and mortgage costs and constrains economic growth by impeding labour mobility.
Reform UK has a housing plan for England: not to address the problem, but to foment social division by making life harder for people born overseas. To state it this way invites the accusation that I’m caricaturing the party’s policy. But it’s accurate. Reform intends to punish people for an accident of birth. This would be iniquitous even if it addressed the housing crisis. It does no such thing.
Reform pledges to bar foreign nationals from social housing. It announced today that it would also give priority in social housing to British citizens born in this country and to young married couples with children.
In short, if you’re a British citizen who’s been a resident in this country for decades, Reform will discriminate against you in allocating social housing if you were born in another country. It will do this too if you’re a Commonwealth citizen who arrived in Britain under an immigration regime that gave you the same rights as British citizens.
The notion there’s any fairness involved is absurd. By definition, your country of birth is a circumstance in which you had no choice. You may be not only diligent, law-abiding and dedicated to Britain, but literally British, and it will be of no avail under Reform’s plans. Social housing will depend not on need but on blood and soil.
It feels grubby to turn to the practicalities of such a plan, but Reform’s policy is a colossal non sequitur in addressing Britain’s housing crisis. It’s untrue there’s a lack of social housing due to migration. New migrants aren’t eligible for social housing except in very restricted circumstances, such as a risk of domestic violence.
Most foreign nationals coming to the UK do so on work or study visas and, as a matter of policy, have “no recourse to public funds”. They aren’t eligible for social housing. The same holds true for asylum seekers, who make up only around 11 per cent of migrants to Britain.
Reform says it will build 50,000 new homes per year in the social housing sector, with no additional taxation or government borrowing. Count me an old-fashioned empiricist, but I suspect that if the party genuinely knew how to achieve this financial miracle, it would give more than unconvincing details. Reform’s answer is threefold: sell existing social homes through Right to Buy, get housing associations to borrow more and channel local government pension assets into the scheme. My suspicion is that it’s something only a little more advanced than a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
The crisis does not anyway lie in a lack of social housing. Around 16 per cent of the housing stock in England, covering some four million homes, is owned by municipal authorities and housing associations – more than in other G7 economies. The problem lies rather in the number of homes generally. There aren’t enough of them.
Inadequate supply, along with prolonged low-interest rates, tax privileges and irresponsible inducements to demand, have driven house prices to historically high levels. In 2025, the median average home in England cost 7.6 times the median average earnings. Though the figure has fallen over the past five years, this still compares with a ratio of around four times in 1980.
Any party serious about housing would commit to a bonfire of planning restrictions. Reform instead pledges to drive people from their homes. This is not hyperbole. The party states that foreign nationals living in social housing would be given three months to move out or face deportation. Single parents with young children, who have breached no laws, would be forcibly evicted from their homes: the policy can’t mean anything else.
Reform may not get the obloquy it merits. A bad policy is still a policy, and young people in particular may welcome this one on the grounds that at least Reform takes the housing crisis seriously. But it doesn’t.
Nigel Farage and Richard Tice (Reform’s deputy leader) are wealthy public schoolboys. Their policy would cause misery for those less privileged, for no social gain but purely to make a political point. They advocate discrimination on grounds of national origin, applied retrospectively. I use no heat or invective in terming this notion a descent into wickedness.
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