The British government will mass book large numbers of private homes for years at a time to house asylum seekers and migrants, in a move that has already been accused of fuelling community tensions by sending rent prices soaring where it’s been implemented.
The UK Labour government will attempt to pivot from the politically explosive policy of putting up asylum seekers in taxpayer-funded hotels to placing them in taxpayer-funded rented houses and apartments instead. Yet the bid to run from one source of bad headlines may see the government stumble into another, as just this week, the massive price inflation caused by the state’s blank cheques on the housing market has been blamed for enflaming riots as young “locals” are simply priced out.
The huge outsourcing firm Serco, already deeply involved in the UK government’s handling of the southern border crisis, is reported by The Daily Telegraph to be moving to scoop up vast swathes of private homes to make this transition possible. Underlining the massive buying power of the government and its ability to stack up alluring incentives to private landlords to outbid the ordinary home-seeking public, the paper reports:
…offering landlords five-year guaranteed full rent deals to house asylum seekers. Prospective landlords were promised rent paid “on time every month with no arrears”, full repair and maintenance, free property management and utilities and council tax bills paid by Serco.
Yet the supply of housing is already a major political issue in the United Kingdom, where population growth — driven almost exclusively by mass migration — has hugely outstripped new building for many years. The Telegraph cited a property market analyst who said of the scheme, now underway: “The private rented sector is already under extreme pressure, with on average, seven applicants competing per available property to rent across the UK.”
As earlier reported, a sudden influx of migrants to a neighbourhood backed by taxpayers’ money to rent homes over the heads of local residents can fuel tensions.
In the past week, the town of Ballymena in Northern Ireland has seen intense rioting. While the spark for this disorder was the alleged attempted rape of a young girl by what has been said to be two Romanian-speaking males, local sentiment around sudden mass migration and its impact on the housing market has been said to have laid the groundwork for that unrest over many months.
As stated by broadcaster GB News’s Ulster correspondent Dougie Beattie in his dispatches from Ballymena:
… “the alleged attack on a 14 year old girl, now that isn’t what is at the very heart of this problem.
“There are other problems in social housing in Northern Ireland… the Mears group has bought up contracts with all the private landlords and what that has done is reduced the housing stock, but it has also done is set up the price of rent much, much higher. Because of course the Mears group pays much, much more than an ordinary person going to hire a house”.
In a separate dispatch Beattie related: “What has happened is that the private landlords make up about 25 per cent of our social housing. Now there’s a group called Mears, I’m sure you have groups exactly the same, that look after migrant costs and housing. And what has happened is that Mears has offered all the private landlords twice the rent in order to keep these migrants because, of course, the government is giving them big money to get them out of the hotels.
“So what’s happened is the people of Ballymena that lived here, born here, actually can’t get housed here and that too is causing friction in this area.”
England has also recently experienced migration-related unrest, with riots triggered last Summer by a mass knife attack at a young girl’s dance party in Southport by a migrant-heritage male. Brexit’s Nigel Farage has already expressed concern that the rioting in Northern Ireland could spread to other parts of the United Kingdom.
He said over the weekend, “Nobody condones setting fire to houses and hunting down foreigners. But there was a population of people, the Roma people, that were put into Ballymena who cannot possibly integrate with the locals and have a completely different set of standards of life beliefs.”
“The truth of it is that immigration only works if you have integration with it. If you don’t, you have a divide… And where human beings are divided, history teaches us, you get conflict. I am very, very deeply worried about what’s happening.”
The UK’s Labour government said it wants to end the practice of housing migrants in hotels by the end of this Parliament, a tacit admission that the practice is to continue for years to come at the very least. While the plan appears, as stated, to be to shunt the hotel migrants into rented accommodation, little has been said about how to actually reduce the number of migrants overall, beyond now questionable promises from Labour to “smash” the smuggling gangs and speed up the approvals process so the backlog shrinks.
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