Raab’s use of outdated and oversimplified evidence is foolhardy
In response to demands that he produce the evidence for his claim that immigration is driving up house prices, the housing minister has now published the calculations. Do they back up his argument? First, it must be said that researching the drivers of house price increases is fraught with difficulty as there are so many […]
Raab’s claims about immigration oversimplify a complex housing problem
Dominic Raab, the housing minister, has rightly been asked to produce the evidence to back up his claim that immigration has put up house prices by 20 per cent over the past 25 years when the research suggests that immigration is just one factor pushing up housing demand and a minor one at that. The […]
Northern Ireland’s distinct housing market
CIH has just published a brand new edition of the book Housing in Northern Ireland, edited by Peter Shanks and David Mullins. Here CIH policy adviser John Perry, one of the authors, gives a flavour of what the new book offers. Less than ten years ago there was a house-building boom in Northern Ireland. Completions […]
Cameron’s Migration ‘Squeeze’
Under pressure from Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in February 2003, Tony Blair conceded that the number of asylum seekers coming to Britain was too high and pledged to halve them by the following September. The promise was widely derided, but Blair had done his homework: officials had assessed the impact of Labour’s 2002 Asylum Act, […]
Shock statistic: some social housing tenants were born abroad
The Daily Mail ‘revealed’ last week that ‘500,000 immigrants have been given social housing in the last decade’. So what was shocking about that? This is no more than should be expected given what we have long known about the proportion of the UK population that were born abroad.
Here come the Romanians – or not? Talk of a housing crisis is a scare story
The next wave will not be a repeat of 2004. The real risk is that low-paid immigrants could be forced to live on the streets.
Sense and census necessity
As a wealth of data continues to pour out from the 2011 census, we need to remind ourselves how valuable it is. Government suggestions that this census might be the last one are nonsensical and should be resisted.
Making sense of migration statistics
Publication of the latest UK statistics brought gleeful reports of a reduction in net migration – the difference between immigration and emigration. But how reliable are the figures?
Migration Watch does it again
Migration Watch’s latest assessment of the impact of migration on housing was only noticed by much of the media when Frank Field MP suddenly decided to use its ‘evidence’ to back his own ideas about how social housing should be allocated. Migration Watch’s line was – as usual – that migrants are getting far too […]
Would an independent Scotland have a radically different immigration policy?
With the planned independence referendum in Scotland now a political football between First Minister Alex Salmond and Prime Minister Cameron, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the implications for immigration policy. Indeed, a recent reader survey by the Daily Record found that Scots were mainly concerned about other issues, while south of the border […]
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua where he works on