Kemi Badenoch has announced that a future Conservative government would ban foreigners from social housing.
Kemi Badenoch (Image: Getty)
Foreigners will be banned from getting council houses if the Conservative Party wins the next general election- and tens of thousands of existing tenants will be kicked out of their properties. It comes as data reveals that nearly 300,000 socially rented homes across the country have a foreign national listed as the lead tenant.
New plans from the Conservatives mean that single tenants not holding UK, Irish or EU citizenship, would lose their property. The same would apply to couples if both people are ineligible under the new rules. Those affected would have six months to move out.
The announcement follows a raft of new policies from the party as Kemi Badenoch continues to take aim at the UK welfare bill.
Mrs Badenoch has previously called for the welfare bill to be significantly reduced to pay for other matters she considers more important, such as defence.
Now Tory officials say that people coming to the UK should be required to integrate, work and pay taxes.
Under their new proposal, some 228,144 council homes would be emptied as their tenants lost their rights to stay in them.
Those homes would then be given to British citizens on the current social home waiting list.
For all future tenancies in social homes, only UK nationals would be eligible, meaning EU citizens would also not be allowed to apply.
The party says this would help clamp down on what it calls the UKs ballooning benefits bill.
Helen Whately MP, Shadow Work and Pensions, said: “Making Britain your home should be earned by working, paying tax and integrating. It should not come with a free ride on the benefits system. Britain cannot be a cash machine for the world.
“Labour has lost control of immigration and lost control of the welfare bill, and it is British families picking up the bill and sitting on waiting lists.
“The next Conservative government will make foreign nationals ineligible for social housing. Nearly 230,000 homes could go to British families.”
According to the Migration Observatory social housing allocations in the UK are not made based on the immigration status or nationality of the applicant.
In January this year Reform UK also stated it would ban foreign nationals from living in social housing, but added that tenants would need to find private accommodation or risk deportation.
Writing in a long-form essay published online Nigel Farage, the party’s leader, said that the policy would apply retrospectively, regardless of how long someone has been in the country.
Reform UK Shadow Home Secretary Zia Yusuf said: “The Tories are trying to copy Reform UK policy, but they still end up betraying their instincts to prioritise foreigners. Incredibly, Kemi Badenoch’s new policy is to allow tens of thousands of foreign nationals from the EU to occupy British social housing funded by British taxpayers.
“Reform UK will ensure British social housing is strictly for British citizens. The Tories say they will continue to give it to foreign nationals while our own people and veterans are left to fend themselves.”
However the Labour Party branded the proposed “unworkable”, saying the Tories had “copied from Reform” who had announced a similar policy earlier year.
A spokesman said: “This is an unserious, unworkable proposal, copied from Reform, that does nothing to tackle the housing crisis the Tories themselves created.
“People without Indefinite Leave to Remain are already ineligible for social housing, so this policy would primarily affect refugees and long-term UK residents who have contributed to this country but are not British citizens, including NHS staff. It would also leave more families at risk of homelessness, while driving up the use of temporary accommodation at the taxpayers’ expense.
“No amount of headline-chasing, or following Reform to the extremes, can hide the damage the Tories did to our housing system. The least they could do is acknowledge their failures and apologise.”