[Sorry, forgot to release this earlier today – happy weekend]<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been buzzing since last week\u2019s housing law masterclasses, and the goodwill in the room as well as outside it.\u00a0 Thank you for the emails, comments, and follow-ups.\u00a0 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<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n 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).\u00a0 The Senedd\u2019s Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee has its chair from Reform UK and two other members as well.\u00a0 You can see this issue of migration and housing becoming a bone of contention weighing down the committee.<\/p>\n So, it is really good to see a robust, sensible, moderate (in a nice way) discussion of the issues of migration and housing. \u00a0In 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.\u00a0 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 \u201ccrisis\u201d (see chapter 5).<\/p>\n The key takeaways are that demography is complicated, and new demand stems not just from migration but also new household formation.\u00a0 The former is necessary given the ageing population but new migrants can tend to stay for relatively short periods of time.\u00a0 The \u201c\u2026 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\u201d (p 19).<\/p>\n Further, when one looks at the housing \u201ccrisis\u201d, we can see that there are supply side and demand side issues.\u00a0 In respect of the former, there is the planning argument, and, the latter, the financialization argument.\u00a0 Financialisation is used here to denote a decoupling of home from housing as a financial asset.\u00a0 I recently finished Brett Christophers\u2019 brilliant book, Our Lives in their Portfolios<\/em> (well worth a read \u2013 he is a leading figure on the financialization of housing).<\/p>\n Chapter 4 is where the action is \u2013 it concerns asylum seeker housing.\u00a0 It makes the point that there are 3,391 asylum seekers being provided housing by the Home Office provider in Wales (Clearsprings Ready Homes).\u00a0 If this is your area, I recommend Jonathan Darling\u2019s book, Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum<\/em>.\u00a0 He also has a really thoughtful paper about the meanings of \u201chotels\u201d<\/a> in this context, which is definitely worth reading.\u00a0 Forgive the digression \u2013 the important point is that number of asylum seekers is half that of Scotland and a tiny proportion of those in England.\u00a0 And, given that decisions are being made in a more timely fashion, there are issues over move-on accommodation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That puts pressure on local authorities (if they apply to them for homelessness assistance).<\/p>\n But, the key point is that Wales has no governmental levers \u2013 this is Home Office decision-making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been buzzing since last week\u2019s housing law masterclasses, and the goodwill in the room as well as outside it.\u00a0 Thank you for the emails, comments, and follow-ups.\u00a0 As I […]","protected":false},"author":7123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asylum"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":463,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/housing-law-wales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}