Scaremongering

Scaremongering

Readers may have noticed that the two respondents to my letter (You vote Reform at your peril) failed to address it main content – Reform’s housing policy.

My opinion that the housing crisis is not the result of immigration is what motivated their response. Jeff Adams appears to exhibit his prejudice that ‘the problem’ is “Mohammed Foreigner”. Non-Muslims are ok are they Jeff?

I must confess I wondered what Terry Reynolds was on about, quoting an apparent government policy of 40% of new build homes “having” to go to “illegal migrants”. Is the government giving these new homes away for free Terry?

Having done a quick google I found a possible source – the Tory Party, desperately shifting to the right to fight off the danger of being electorally obliterated by Reform. Terry has got the wrong end of the stick, even so.

That august journal the Sun reported that almost four in ten new homes built by 2030 “will be needed to house migrants”. Those brilliant people in Conservative Party Reseach had looked at the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook which predicts net migration of 1,172,792 between 2026 and 2030.

Using the ONS average household size they say that would require 499,000 new homes just to house new arrivals. From this they deduce: “That means 37.1 percent of of all homes built in the next five years would go towards housing immigrants, rising to 39.1 percent by 2030.”

“Go towards” is a slippery formulation, but, in any case not giving away, Terry. Notice they say say immigrants, not “illegal immigrants”. In fact these crystal ball gazers cannot provide any evidence that this will happen. Shadow Housing Secretary James Cleverly said: “Labour can promise a building spree, but the OBR’s own figures show more than a third of those homes will be absorbed by migration before local families even get a look in.”

“Will be”? “Before local families”? How does he know that? I thought they supported the free market? As a migrant you can’t apply for social housing unless you have ‘leave to remain’ never mind being given a free new build to own. Then there is usually a residential period to qualify to go on the waiting list.

This is just scaremongering by a political party whose electoral base is melting away. They are trying to out-Reform Reform, which is bound to fail.

The thing about debates, whether in the pages of the Advertiser or elsewhere, is you need evidenceor else you are making baseless assertions.

So Terry, what is Reform’s housing policy? How is it going to resolve the housing crisis? Perhaps you can enlighten us? What is Reform going to do to get more than 130,000 households out of temporary accommodation, including 170,000 children? What about the 1.3 million households on the waiting lists? Why didn’t their spokesperson mention council housing?

There is no government ‘dictat’ to give 40% of all new builds to “illegal migrants”. Can you prove otherwise Terry? Your old enough to know you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.

Martin Wicks