Two-Tier Social Housing

Migrants who live in social housing must be deported and social housing must be sold off to lower housing costs. It's only fair.

Back in 2023, I helped to bring the issue of social housing to national prominence. At the time, social housing was one of those national institutions, like the BBC or NHS, that enjoyed uncontested support across the political spectrum. Back then, if social housing was thought of at all, people spoke of it as a nice way for hardworking British key workers to live in areas that were otherwise far too expensive for them to afford.

The 2021 national census gave us all kinds of interesting data on the true nature of social housing in Britain, not that any mainstream journalist dared to look into it. What it showed was that Britain’s social housing system is one of the most unfair and inefficient parts of British society, directly harming the prospects of millions of hardworking Brits and rewarding people who should never have been in this country in the first place.

Alongside the valuable and essential work of Pimlico Journal, I revealed how social housing entrenches a two-tier system: one tier for those of us who have to work hard and pay for ourselves, and another tier for the select few who are given enormous subsidies we pay for. In 2024 I shared how in places like London’s South Bank, where the average one-bedroom flat cost £2745 a month to rent, those in social housing paid a fifth of that, an average of £487 per month.

But the most staggering part of what I revealed was not how enormous the subsidy given to those in social housing is, but the type of person benefiting from this subsidy. Rather than going to hardworking Brits, vast amounts of prime social housing was being given to people not even born in the country, let alone that local area. Altogether, the social houses headed by a foreign-born national receive an implied subsidy of over £6 billion every single year. This is an eye-wateringly large amount of money that would be better and more fairly spent in hundreds of other ways, and that the British public would never accept had they been consulted on creating this kind of system.

In our capital city, half of all social housing households are headed by someone born abroad. It is a fact that has now become well known, often repeated by politicians and commentators, but it is worth underlining just how insane it is. Britain gives away half of social housing in some of the most expensive and desirable areas in the world to migrants. Why?

It all comes down to how social housing is allocated. Rather than priority given to the most productive or necessary members of the community, those people responsible for keeping society going and keeping us alive, social housing is allocated according to need. That is to say, the more needy one is, the less they are able to provide for themselves, the more dependent they are on others, the greater priority they are given. These are the people who then get given social housing: the least self-sufficient and least productive.

Coupled with our insane immigration policies of the last few decades, that is how we have reached a point where Britain is importing people from around the world who then occupy taxpayer-funded housing, at enormous expense. We import people who are dysfunctional and unable to pay their own way, and then the British state rewards them with social housing and a secure tenure, meaning they then get that subsidised housing for life.

Even more crazily, these people are then allowed to legally sublet out bedrooms and keep all the profit. We are allowing foreigners too dysfunctional to pay for their own accommodation to make huge personal financial gains at our expense, and that is without going into the enormous illegal subletting that plagues social housing, which no government dares crack down on.

None of this is fair. How can it be that the British state spares no expense on the dysfunctional, giving them housing often of better quality than those who pay can get? Why are we importing people to Britain who are unable to even pay for their own accommodation, let alone make any kind of fiscal benefit to the country? Why should we put up with this?

And all of this is as of the 2021 census, before the Boriswave immigration explosion and the ramping up of the small boats crisis. The foreign population has increased enormously since then, and the number of foreigners occupying social housing almost certainly has too. That’s yet another reason we urgently need an emergency census, to understand just how drastically the situation has changed and learn of the real extent of demographic change taking place in every corner of British society.

The situation is especially enraging for those of us who the British state treats purely extractively, taking our money to pay for social housing and then leaving us to fend for ourselves in the unaffordable private sector. For young people like myself, who do everything right, study hard to get good grades, survive a punishing job market, and are willing to leave the areas we call home to advance our careers, the best we can hope for are often shoebox flats shared with multiple other people in the less appealing parts of our towns or cities.

Meanwhile, our literal neighbours will be those who never bothered to do things right, who never bothered to work hard or pay for themselves, and for this they are rewarded with larger, nicer houses that we pay for whilst putting up with worse living conditions for ourselves. This is simply not fair, nor is it conducive to a successful society. We have created two tiers of society: the dysfunctional and unproductive who get all sorts of money and resources thrown at them, and the productive whose resources are taken to pay for it all.

This kind of unfairness cannot continue to stand. It must be fixed, and luckily, it can easily be fixed. We can stop rewarding the dysfunctional and punishing the productive. We can allow areas closest to the country’s most important labour markets to be lived in by people who actually work, not the idle.

We can instil hope in our young by offering a future brighter than dingy flatshares and cramped commutes. We can reduce housing costs for most people and regenerate areas that have been needlessly held back. We can do all of this if we free up social housing, returning to letting the market decide who it is allocated to rather than having the state’s favoured groups housed in them.

Our politicians are finally recognising the problem, but they do not go far enough. The Tories, who are responsible for importing millions into Britain and giving more social housing away to foreigners than ever before, are now timidly suggesting taking social housing back from only some foreign nationals. This is laughably inadequate, and in typically Tory style comes nowhere near to meeting the moment we’re in.

Social housing must be sold off. Those migrants who came here and, instead of contributing to society, started to live in social housing and make the most of all the welfare benefits they could find must be deported. We do not want a Britain that rewards dysfunction and imports the world’s most dysfunctional. We do not have to accept such a Britain. We will change it.