Migration and housing – Senedd Research

[Sorry, forgot to release this earlier today – happy weekend]

I’ve been buzzing since last week’s housing law masterclasses, and the goodwill in the room as well as outside it.  Thank you for the emails, comments, and follow-ups.  As I was thinking about what to pick up from some of the things we discussed last week, up popped a research briefing from the brilliant Senedd Research team, Migration and Housing Pressures in Wales.

While the opposition party are in the process of internally combusting, they are known for their opposition to migration partly because of its effects on the housing system (putting it neutrally).  The Senedd’s Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee has its chair from Reform UK and two other members as well.  You can see this issue of migration and housing becoming a bone of contention weighing down the committee.

So, it is really good to see a robust, sensible, moderate (in a nice way) discussion of the issues of migration and housing.  In essence, the argument can be summarized like this: migration is complicated, and its relationship with housing even more complicated because lots of factors affect housing demand and housing supply.  Migration itself may increase the number of households but, even if there was no migration, there would still be a housing shortage. The author/s of the paper cleverly are rather more interested in what can be done to address the housing “crisis” (see chapter 5).

The key takeaways are that demography is complicated, and new demand stems not just from migration but also new household formation.  The former is necessary given the ageing population but new migrants can tend to stay for relatively short periods of time.  The “… housing characteristics of international migrants in the UK broadly converge with those of the general population over time, though this varies somewhat according to country of origin, and across different generations of migrants” (p 19).

Further, when one looks at the housing “crisis”, we can see that there are supply side and demand side issues.  In respect of the former, there is the planning argument, and, the latter, the financialization argument.  Financialisation is used here to denote a decoupling of home from housing as a financial asset.  I recently finished Brett Christophers’ brilliant book, Our Lives in their Portfolios (well worth a read – he is a leading figure on the financialization of housing).

Chapter 4 is where the action is – it concerns asylum seeker housing.  It makes the point that there are 3,391 asylum seekers being provided housing by the Home Office provider in Wales (Clearsprings Ready Homes).  If this is your area, I recommend Jonathan Darling’s book, Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum.  He also has a really thoughtful paper about the meanings of “hotels” in this context, which is definitely worth reading.  Forgive the digression – the important point is that number of asylum seekers is half that of Scotland and a tiny proportion of those in England.  And, given that decisions are being made in a more timely fashion, there are issues over move-on accommodation.  There is a significant issue caused by the short timescales that successful asylum-seekers have to leave their Home Office provided accommodation and find new accommodation.  That puts pressure on local authorities (if they apply to them for homelessness assistance).

But, the key point is that Wales has no governmental levers – this is Home Office decision-making.