Why are we importing people to be a burden on the UK welfare state?

I THINK we can all agree that social housing is a resource in very scarce supply in the United Kingdom.

More than a million British families are on social housing waiting lists. At least 30,000 people have been waiting for ten years or more.

And it is not even just a question of more money being needed to tackle the chronic shortfall. Our planning system is necessarily rigorous given our relatively small landmass and high population density, so the physical capacity of the state to sufficiently increase supply is also constrained.

Yet having a council or housing association tenancy does not just bring a family some much-needed stability on the home front, it is also worth a small fortune. Typically the rent on a social home is about half that which the same home would attract on the private market – a subsidy worth several thousand pounds a year to tenants.

Given all this, it surely follows that it cannot be a good idea to import people from other nations to take up social housing in the UK ahead of our own citizens. And given all we hear from the pro-mass migration zealots about the alleged economic boon provided, one would expect to find a very low take-up rate for social housing among migrant groups.

Yet this turns out not to be the case. Figures from the Oxford Migration Observatory show that the proportion of foreign-born UK residents living in social housing is actually slightly higher overall than for UK-born citizens, 17 per cent compared to 16 per cent.

Far from sensibly arranging a migrant population dominated by wealthy go-getters, we have actually managed to import a needier cohort of people than we had living in the country in the first place.