Supply and Demand: Mass Migration Responsible for at Least 30 Per Cent of Rent Spike in Britain

The Conservative Party’s mass migration policies are responsible for over a third of the post-coronavirus surge in rental prices in Britain, an analysis has found.

Between mid-2021 and the end of 2023, rent rose in Britain by an average of 30 per cent, of which migration contributed 11 per cent, according to a breakdown from the Capital Economics research firm. Putting the rise into context, during the entire ten years before the coronavirus, rent only rose by 26 per cent.

The firm noted that while rent traditionally increased roughly in line with wages, with wages rising by 27 per cent during the decade before 2021 compared to a 26 per cent rent hike, between mid-2021 and the end of 2023, wages only increased by 17 per cent, compared to the 30 per cent rent spike, adding further fuel to the cost of living crisis in the country.

The anylisis found that the open borders agenda of the poorly-named Conservative government resulted in additional 430,000 households seeking to rent properties between mid-2021 and June of 2023. With approximately 4.9 million rentals within the country, the influx of foreigners drove up demand by nearly nine per cent, Capital Economics said.

Andrew Wishart, the head of the housing service at Capital Economics, told The Telegraph that this was approximately three times the average of 150,000 additional households seeking rentals over every two year period in the preceding decade.

Ben Brindle of the Migration Observatory said: “It just comes back to supply and demand. If you have population growth and the housing stock is not growing as fast, that puts pressure on rents.

“Migrant homeownership rates tend to be lower, so in terms of where their demand on housing is, it is in the rental sector.”

The rental price analysis further discredits the ubiquitous neo-liberal narrative — pushed by the legacy media and leading figures in the Conservative Party as well as the left-wing Labour Party — that mass migration is a panacea for economic development.

It comes after a report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) which categorically refuted the idea that mass migration benefitted the British economy to any significant regard, while negatively impacting the economic prosperity of individual citizens.

Proponents of the dubious correlation between mass migration and economic prosperity often point to the ability of the government to raise more taxes and an overall increase to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a nation, the CPS argued that a better indicator of the economic health of the country is GDP per capita as it actually reveals the prosperity of the average citizen.

Citing figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the report found that even amid record levels of immigration, the British economy only grew by 0.1 per cent last year. Yet, GDP per capital stood at negative 0.8 per cent, compared to the G7 average of an increase of 1.2 per cent. This comes despite the UK having the second-highest population growth of any G7 country, most of which was driven by mass migration.

In addition to seeing worse outcomes economically, the report noted that British citizens were negatively impacted by migration through the strain placed on social services — crucially the UK’s socialised healthcare system — and a downward pressure on their wages, with cheap foreign labour artificially allowing employers to pay workers less overall.

This reality — long-held common knowledge among the working class — was a key driver behind the Brexit referendum on leaving the European Union, which Boris Johnson had promised would allow the country to cut immigration free from the diktats of Brussels. However, once given power, Johnson championed legislation which drastically increased the number of migrants eligible to come to the the UK without any hard cap on annual influxes.

Unsurprisingly, this resulted in net immigration — the number of immigrants minus those who left the country — hitting an all-time record of 467,000 in 2021, while rising even more in 2022 when net migration hit a staggering 745,000. While this dropped to 672,000 in year before June 2023, net migration was still almost four times as high as the 184,000 seen in 2019.

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