The news reporters who've never heard of immigration
Spare us these "concerned" men who don't understand the housing crisis
Yesterday Sky News ran a story on the “seaside town where there are not enough homes to go around”: Hastings.
Reporter Nick Martin spent time with the council’s on-duty housing officers “to understand why Britain is gripped by a housing crisis that is causing misery for thousands of people”.
During the course he observed a 77-year-old called Eunice Dolby, who lost her husband last year - and had now been made homeless for the first time as the result of a Section 21 (no fault) eviction notice.
Equally tragic was the case of 18-year-old Leah Gartside, mother of a 14-month-old baby, who had been living at her parents’ - but they too had received a Section 21 notice.
In places the report was, frankly, a bit terrifying:
“There are 500 households living in temporary accommodation in Hastings and it's costing the council a fortune. In 2019, the council spent £730,000 on temporary accommodation.
“Within the next year, the council estimates that bill will rise to £5.6m. This is a third of the total budget for the whole town - pushing the council to the brink of bankruptcy.”
Clearly, the UK better do something about there being “not enough homes to go around”, given the extraordinary expenditure councils are clocking up.
But after a week inside Hastings Borough Council, Martin didn’t seem to be any wiser as to why housing is such a mess.
Section 21
Martin made his ignorance known fairly early on in the report, in this comment on Section 21 evictions:
“According to Crisis, landlords are using Section 21s a lot. They’re up by a third this year and tenants can’t do anything about it. The Government’s promised to ban them but they haven’t”, he told viewers.
Clearly, the problem, as Martin summarised, is that the Government has been too slow to implement the ban; if only it was sped up, tenants would be safer, goes the fashionable narrative.
But this is amateur logic. It is the introduction/ threat of the ban, paired with mortgage rises, that is causing landlords to sell up - many of whom like the reassurance of being able to evict a tenant (however unethical Section 21s are).
Of course, I suspect most people reading this know. Yet Sky News’s People and Politics Correspondent seems to need a basic lesson in economics.
Immigration
Extraordinarily, for a report on housing that’s 15 minutes long and repeatedly mentions the huge shortage of homes in the UK, Martin doesn’t once mention one of the biggest drivers of demand: immigration.
Even when Martin is shown that the council has six properties available for 1500 households looking for accommodation, the word doesn’t come up.
Pointing to the council’s house bidding system, Martin says: “So somewhere today there’ll be someone clicking on this somewhere, hoping against hope… but actually the odds are completely stacked against them; it’s likely that whoever’s looking at this isn’t going to get this at all.”
Nowhere does he connect these “odds” to the fact that net migration was approximately 672,000 last year, and the number of new dwellings built around 230,000, nor that net migration was 745,000 in 2022 and there’s a shortfall in housing estimated to be four million.
To be fair to Martin, Sky isn’t the first station to pretend immigration doesn’t exist.
Daniel Hewitt, a reporter at ITV, has been trying to cultivate something of a reputation as Mr Housing on the channel.
It’s not a bad career move; a way of showing you’re one of the good guys of news.
His reports, like Martin’s, often feature interviews with vulnerable people in temporary accommodation, and lots of “concerned” facial expressions.
He, like Martin, has also fallen victim to the affliction of omission-itis; unable to acknowledge the bleedin’ obvious (there too many people in the UK for the number of homes) - even when it’s being spelled out to him.
Case in point: in Hewitt’s recent report on homelessness, a support worker tells him: “The thresholds for the other statutory services have risen so high; it’s so hard to get any of the other services engaged with most of the people we work with.”
But the piece continues with a quote from the local council, saying that they have been facing “unprecedented budget pressures”.
Make no mistake: this type of reporting, along with other cries of “council cuts!”, is designed to make us pay (useless) councils EVEN more money, to cater for the indefinite demand for their services.
The current situation isn’t fair on British people - and part of why 77-year-old widows are sitting with suitcases of all of their possessions at their local councils.
Nor is it acceptable for reputable outlets to pump out stories omitting basic reality. If these men cannot get the facts straight then they should leave the news industry and take their sanctimony elsewhere.
Great piece. But what is ‘unethical’ about Section 21? It simply allows a landlord to take repossession of a property once the mutually agreed contract between tenant and landlord has been concluded. It’s not really a ‘No fault eviction’, it’s simply the end of a business agreement.
Saying they should be banned is like saying people renting a car should be allowed to keep it for as long as they like, the only way Avis or whatever could get it back is by taking the driver to court. No government would impose this condition on the car rental business. The reason they can do it to landlords is that they are usually ‘little people’ with one or two properties, not big international companies like car rental firms.
The idea that ‘greedy landlords’ are responsible for the housing crisis is nonsense. The government has caused it. But meddling in what we laughingly refer to as a ‘Market’.
More here if you’re interested. https://open.substack.com/pub/lowstatus/p/full-house?r=evzeq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
When supply and demand are out of equilibrium you will get shortages and rising prices.
In the case of housing the government deliberately constrains supply (via the TCPA) and allows demand to run riot to an extent that supply, even in an unconstrained normally functioning market, would struggle to meet. And we then get hand wringing about the inevitable result and futile attempts to solve the problem by doing things that don’t address the disequilibrium.
This stuff is not rocket science.