Wednesday 27 July 2011

I'm pleasantly surprised he said that.

From The Daily Mail:

Tory backbencher Julian Brazier, author of a paper on rising population, said: ‘Late motherhood is one more example of how property prices in Britain are making family life increasingly unattainable.’

Mr Brazier, MP for Canterbury, said: ‘Despite the downturn, we have the highest property prices in the world in relation to incomes.
There is also the effect of immigration, which is responsible for two fifths of housing demand. It is important that the Government succeeds in getting immigration down.’


Well done for pointing out that high house prices are bad for 'family life', something which the Tories claim to support (but don't).
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He's a bit off piste with the immigration sideswipe though. It's true that recent immigrants have a slight advantage when it comes to social housing - the IPPR published some research which purported to show they don't, but they were too honest for the own good and the figures they included said otherwise.

What he probably means is that the net number of immigrants per year (presumably divided by two to give number of households) is equivalent to two fifths of the number new houses built per year*. So yes, getting immigration down is one possibility, the other is just allowing more houses to be built.

* Net immigration from 'New Commonwealth and EU8' was about 160,000 a year, divide by 2 = 80,000, for a long time, new construction every year was about 200,000, 80,000/200,000 is two-fifths. Of course, now that the Tories have got in, they have restricted new construction to 100,000, so next year they'll be able to say that immigrants take up four-fifths of housing.

10 comments:

Deniro said...

you can see how house prices have changed by the quality of cars parked outside modest terraced houses nowadays compared to thirty years ago

JuliaM said...

The problem with the 'allowing more houses to be built' is that just about EVERYWHERE in London and the south east seems to have a housing development squeezed onto the tiniest bit of available land wherever you look.

And please, don't say 'build on the Green Belt then'..!

Mark Wadsworth said...

Den, interesting point. Maybe there's an inverse correlation between old bangers parked outside large houses (owned by pensioners, house and car both bought for tuppence decades ago) and shiney new cars parked outside terraced houses (owned by young people, bought for £oodles in past few years).

JM: "the south east seems to have a housing development squeezed onto the tiniest bit of available land wherever you look."

It may seem like that to you but if you look out of an aeroplane or train window, you'll realise that even the South East is only about ten per cent developed and ninety per cent fields.

Great London is well over ten per cent of the total population on just over half a per cent of the UK by surface area, for example.

James said...

"the IPPR published some research which purported to show they don't, but they were too honest for the own good and the figures they included said otherwise."

Misrepresenting figures in a publication isn't honesty!

A K Haart said...

"next year they'll be able to say that immigrants take up four-fifths of housing."

And call it a shocking increase.

Bayard said...

Well, if the population isn't increasing except for nte immigration, then immigration should be responsible for 100% of housing demand, except that it isn't because most new housing is built so that people can relocate, rather than to house the homeless, otherwise there would be no empty houses.

Derek said...

Dunno about the UK but Steve Keen has graphed population growth against house prices for Australia and Ben Rabidoux has done the same for Canada. Neither of them found any correlation worth noting between population growth and the price of housing. And that's in countries with much higher percentage rates of immigration than the UK. Both demonstrated that housing price was much more strongly related to the availability of cheap mortgages. And while I haven't seen an equivalent analysis for the UK, I wouldn't be too surprised if one demonstrated similar results.

Mark Wadsworth said...

J, if you publish the actual figures, you can put any spin on it you like, e.g. The Daily Mail will say "Britain swamped by wave of half a million immigrants" in the headline and mention in the small print that in the same period, 400,000 of them emigrated again, along with 100,000 Britons. The IPPR on the other hand will report this as "Foreign-born people are four times as likely to emigrate as Britons".

AKH, just wait 'til they get to zero new builds and 50,000 net immigration: "Immigrants take up infinity per cent of new housing".

B, it's a mixture of all those things.

D, of course there is no particular correlation, see my pretty charts here (click them if you want to see them more clearly). But it's fair to say that there's a correlation between rental values and population density (or between population density and rental values, depending which way you look at it).

Robin Smith said...

There are a million empty homes in the country. We dont need to build any more. Saying we do means one is connected up to the Matrix with gold plated cables. Especially if one supports LVT.

Even if not, exactly correct though:

More people = more demand = more supply = more wealth(housing capital built in the spaces). All the way to infinity.

There are no limits to wages and the creation of wealth. Unless one has fallen into the Malthusian trap. This reporter has as per usual. Ricardo, Smith and Mill all did too. Great minds. But not that great. Too much hero worship. To little self thought.

There is plenty.

Robin Smith said...

MW on rental values, Exactly correct.

Rent will rise with a growing population. In fact that is the primary cause of the increase in land value.

Next is technology and better government. Dont hold your breath.

So immigration will help to recover the economy in general. That might be a painful thought for anti immigrants. But its true.