LEO MCKINSTRY: Do not let asylum seekers jump the council-home queue

Nye Bevan, the Labour firebrand and post-war architect of the NHS, famously declared that ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism’. In any functioning democracy, the Government’s priorities should surely be focused on the people who live and work in the country it runs.

Yet despite regularly invoking Bevan in misty-eyed speeches, Sir Keir Starmer seems to have forgotten any sense of where his priorities ought to lie.

As this paper reported yesterday, his government is proposing that asylum seekers should be accommodated in newly built council homes, despite a desperate shortage of affordable housing for British people.

Bonkers

It is as if he and his increasingly despised cabinet believe that, while the rights of British citizens can be ignored, our country owes a living to a vast swathe of newcomers who have no connection with our land beyond a wish to settle here and desire to avail themselves of the generosity of our welfare system.

Even in the face of mounting concern from many Labour backbenchers, the plan – rightly described as ‘bonkers’ by one Labour MP – is gaining momentum.

Around 200 local authorities have expressed an interest in the pilot scheme, among them Brighton, Peterborough, Thanet, Hartlepool, Hackney and Powys in Wales.

Yet this wave of municipal enthusiasm only illustrates how badly the political establishment is out of touch with public opinion.

Hard-working, taxpaying British families correctly think that council housing is primarily for local people who have their roots in the area, not for new arrivals, many of whom may have reached our shores illegally.

At a time when there are over 1.3 million families on the official waiting list for social housing, it is outrageous for the state to be plotting to give any kind of precedence to asylum seekers.

The Government’s approach makes a mockery of fairness – which in Nye Bevan’s era was meant to be the core principle of the Labour movement.

But then the concept of social justice has long been weakened by the modern Labour Party’s attachment to identity politics.

That is how we ended up in a position where 48 per cent of all social housing in London now goes to foreign-born people, and where 72 per cent of Somalis in Britain live in state-subsidised accommodation.

In the name of ‘inclusion’, housing policy has in many cases become tainted by discrimination, with organisations in the sector boasting of their cultural bias.

The Bangla Housing Association in London, for example, proclaims its mission is to ‘provide good quality, affordable homes and relevant support services to those in the local Bengali and other Black and Ethnic Minority communities’.

The British are a remarkably tolerant people and many will feel minority communities need all the help they can get. But the way that sectarianism has been dressed up in the language of equality is a prime reason that the electorate has become so disillusioned with mainstream politics and is turning to Reform.

Schemes like this policy to give asylum seekers new council homes will just add fuel to the engines of Nigel Farage’s party, while social cohesion will be lost and integration weakened as a result.

Indeed, far from helping to tackle illegal immigration, the policy will provide an additional incentive to the reckless smuggling gangs and their clients.

By planning new homes for asylum seekers, the Government has demonstrated once again that Britain under Starmer has become the softest of touches. Ministers may argue it is a necessary alternative to the disastrously expensive approach of putting up asylum seekers in hotels, which last year cost no less than £4.9 billion. But the aim should be to stop them arriving here in the first place.

Illegal immigrants have to be shown some kind of disincentive. A tough approach of deterrence can only work if Britain has an offshore centre outside Europe for processing asylum claims and accepting deportees, which is precisely why it was such a mistake for the Starmer Government to abandon the Tory Rwanda plan.

Without a deterrent, illegal migrants have nothing to fear, the pull factors remain as strong as ever and the Border Force will continue to operate as a quasi-ferry service.

Tellingly, in the wake of Rwanda’s rejection by Starmer, the number of asylum claims in the year to September 2025 reached 110,000, easily the highest on record.

The Labour Cabinet complained about the cost of the Rwandan plan, but walking away from it is also proving costly. Last week, it was reported that the Kigali government is suing London for more than £50 million over the loss of the migrant deal.

Quagmire

The reality is that Labour has been sucked into this quagmire, partly because of the catastrophic policy of open door immigration, which has put an unprecedented strain on civic infrastructure.

Leading politicians from both the main parties continually told us that the massive, unending influx - which in the year to June 2023 reached an incredible net total of 906,000 – was a sure route to prosperity, but it has hardly worked out like that.

In fact, the loosening of border controls has been accompanied by sluggish growth, paralysed living standards and worsening job security. At the same time, taxes have gone up their highest level since the end of the Second World War to support the bloated welfare system.

Back then British households and businesses felt a duty to fork out for the rebuilding of their country after the ravages of conflict. But today they are paying to cover the impact of something for which they never voted: the transformation of our society through an explosion in mass immigration.

Voters never gave a mandate to any government to embark on this social revolution, but they still had to meet its gargantuan costs.

Exploit

Only yesterday, it was reported that the cost to councils of providing social care to adult asylum seekers has almost tripled in five years, from £50.6 million in 2019/20 to £133.9 million in 2024/25.

It is the same story elsewhere. Complaints about ‘underfunding’ are the remorseless soundtrack of the public sector, yet our bureaucrats usually seem to have the cash for their cherished causes like diversity and for housing asylum seekers.

Nor do they seem to care about the way in which the benefits system has been so perverted by immigration.

As envisaged by its mastermind Lord Beveridge in the early 1940s it was meant to be a safety net to stop British people sinking into poverty.

Yet today, it provides a living for people who may be contributing little to our society.

Disturbingly, there are now almost 2 million foreign nationals here who are claiming benefit. Or to put it another way, households with at least one foreign national are claiming at least £10 billion a year in Universal Credit.

The economist Milton Friedman said that a nation can either have an open-door migration policy or an expansive welfare system, but could not have both because the former would allow too many to exploit the latter.

That is exactly what is happening in modern Britain. We cannot continue be the world’s hotel – and the last thing we should be doing is giving asylum seekers priority housing over the people who live in this country.