Immigration statistics published by the ONS in May show that, when it comes to housing, we’re stuck running up the down escalator – one that is getting faster and faster. 

Net migration soared to a record 606,000 in 2022. That equates to population growth of 0.9% or adding two cities the size of Newcastle to the UK in just a single year. There’s a good chance this estimate will be revised upwards in due course too, much as the estimate for 2021 was increased by 23% in the May data release.

In any case, this already unprecedented number has provoked recriminations across government (so much for the promise that ‘overall numbers will come down’) and prompted a flurry of commentary on its wider implications. Housing has become central to this debate, for almost nobody now denies that we are in the grip of a dire housing crisis, and only the truly blinkered can maintain that increasing demand at a much faster rate than supply is irrelevant to the situation.

At the Centre for Policy Studies, we have been banging the drum on this for a while. In particular, in summer 2021 we used the Government’s own methodology to draw attention to the widening gulf between the existing housebuilding target and the target we actually needed to set. In light of last month’s immigration revelations, I have updated this analysis and extended it backwards to 2013. The picture that emerges is pretty grim.

Notionally, the Government still has a housebuilding target of almost 300,000 homes a year in England (not the UK as a whole). This target is based on a set of assumptions about underlying population growth, household formation and housing market trends, as well as net migration (to England) of 170,500 per annum. Those endogenous factors account for the bulk of the housebuilding target, with net migration adding demand for another 72,250 homes.