Rayner scraps plans to limit social housing applications to long-term British residents

[dutchman]

Labour ends plans by Michael Gove to introduce a ‘UK connection test’ to limit social housing to those resident for at least 10 years



Angela Rayner has dropped Tory plans to limit applications for social housing to long-term British residents.

The Housing Secretary has formally scrapped reforms that would have prevented recently arrived migrants from applying for a council house in England.

It comes with almost 1.3 million households on local authority waiting lists for social housing.

Ms Rayner has vowed to ramp up the provision of new social homes as part of wider planning reforms to boost housebuilding.

Official government figures show that in 2022-23, the number of new social lets agreed where the “lead tenant” was a foreign national was 26,176.

Under current rules people from abroad need to have an immigration status “with recourse to public funds”, such as being eligible for access to benefits, in order to qualify for a social home.

This can include refugees who have had their asylum applications approved as well as migrants who have been granted indefinite leave to remain.

Michael Gove, the former housing secretary, published proposals in January that would have prevented many of those from qualifying in future.

He planned to introduce a “UK connection test” which would have restricted social housing to those who had been resident for at least 10 years.

British and Irish citizens, Commonwealth citizens with a right of abode, and European citizens who were resident before Brexit would have remained eligible.

The test would have been applied to those people on the waiting list, affecting many foreign nationals already in the queue for a social home.

Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister who reports to Ms Rayner, announced last week that Labour would not be going forward with the proposals.

“The Government does not intend to enact the policy proposals set out in the consultation,” he said in response to a written question from Kemi Badenoch.

Many migrants do not qualify for social housing, including small boat arrivals who have not yet had their asylum applications processed.

Economic migrants on work visas and foreign students do not have recourse to public funds and are therefore not eligible either.

But the Government is set to fast-track the asylum applications of 90,000 illegal migrants who had been earmarked for deportation to Rwanda.

It is expected that two-thirds of them will be granted the right to remain, meaning that they could then qualify to apply for social housing.