Appearing on the BBC’s Newsnight show on 3 November, Reform UK’s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, made the following statement:
“The majority of social housing in London goes to foreign nationals.”
It appears 6 minutes and 51 seconds into the BBC Sounds archive of the interview and 6 minutes and 17 seconds into its posting on YouTube
It was a dramatic claim to make, particularly in view of the chronic social housing shortage that forms part of London’s housing emergency. According to government figures, there were more than 330,000 households on London local authority waiting lists for social housing in 2024, the highest since 2013.
The allocation of social housing when it becomes available is, therefore, a difficult and delicate matter for London’s social housing landlords – its local councils and housing associations. Who should be at the front of the queue for this scarce resource? If more foreigners than British Londoners are being given these precious tenancies, as Yusuf said they are, that would, to say the least, be very odd. It would also make some people very angry.
I asked Reform UK to provide me with Yusuf’s evidence for his claim. I received no reply. I ask them five more times. Still no reply. I asked Yusuf and Reform chairman David Bull directly on X/Twitter. No response.
Meanwhile, I’ve been asking London’s social landlords if is the case that “the majority of social housing in London goes to foreign nationals.” And I’ve been looking at the very latest government figures about social housing tenancies in England, which were published yesterday. These inquires have revealed that the claim Yusuf made on Newsnight was wrong. Very wrong indeed.
Those new government figures show that during the financial year 2024/25 across England as a whole, 502,000 people in 263,000 households received a new social letting. Of the “lead tenants” of these households – the person whose name goes on the contract – 89 per cent were to UK nationals.
Could it really be that in London the situation was so radically different during that period that, despite only 11 per cent of new lettings in all of England – which includes London, of course – going to foreign nationals, in London itself a “the majority” of them did?
The government’s statistical release doesn’t include a regional breakdown. However, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government maintains a sub-national social housing lettings data dashboard.
This provides insights into a range of characteristics of lead tenants, including their nationalities. Number crunchers at the G15 group, which represents the largest housing associations operating in the capital, dug into it for me. They found that just 17 per cent of new social housing lets in London during 2024/25 went to foreign national lead tenants – significantly fewer than a majority.
Where did Yusuf get the completely wrong idea that “the majority of social housing in London goes to foreign nationals.”?
Perhaps he was remembering – in fact, misremembering – a similar sort of claim made earlier this year by a leading figure in a rival political party Reform has pledged to replace – the Conservatives.
In March, shadow home secretary and London MP Chris Philp took X/Twitter to claim that “48% of London’s social housing is occupied by people who are foreign”. This assertion was different from Yusuf’s in that it referred to all current social housing tenancies, some of which go back decades, rather than to recent allocations, as Yusuf’s appeared to. But it was the same in being highly inaccurate.
Philp made his claim on the basis of a map compiled by a far-Right online agitator whose definition of a foreigner includes British people who were not born in the United Kingdom – an extraordinary source for a senior figure in a supposedly respectable political party to rely on. The map also misrepresented the data it drew on. That data refers only to the “household reference person” – a new term for head of household, effectively the single individual whose name is on the rental contract, not all the people who live in the property.
I looked into Philp’s claim at the time and demonstrated that the true figure for the number of people living in London social housing is not 48 per cent, but about 15 per cent. Reuters and The Standard later did the same.
In the absence of any enlightenment from Reform, I have again searched in vain for any factual basis for Yusuf’s (or Philp’s) claims about foreigners and London social housing.
For example, in March 2024, answering a question from London Assembly member Sem Moema, Sir Sadiq Khan said that in 2021/22, 84 per cent of new social home lettings in London had been to UK nationals. And in December of last year, research by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory, based on the 2021 Census findings, showed that 11 per cent of London social housing was occupied by foreign nationals.
False and misleading allegations about foreign nationals and social housing are nothing new, but they have gathered fresh momentum in the past couple of years, facilitated, of course, by Elon Musk’s social media platform. They form part of a wider populist-Right propaganda agenda which focusses much of its attention on London. The capital, despite its vital importance to the UK and the admiration its enjoys around the world, exemplifies everything people in such circles most dislike.
Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire did not pick up on Yusuf’s remark, but no criticism of her is implied here – if you watch or listen to her interview, you will see or hear that he slipped in his dubious claim at a point when she was trying to get him to give a proper answer to a question she had asked him earlier.
But if Reform or the Conservatives try advancing such claims again, follow journalist in Big Media need to be ready for them. As one of the London social housing experts I spoke to put it, what Zia Yusuf said on Newsnight was “grossly misleading and factually untrue”.
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