Date published: 2007/05/20
The BBC says:
Established British families should be given priority over economic migrants for council housing, government minister Margaret Hodge has said.
She has called for a rethink of social housing policy, to take account of length of residence, citizenship and national insurance contributions.
Social housing was limited and British families had a "legitimate sense of entitlement" to have their own homes.
The Lib Dems said the fault lay with Labour for selling off council homes.
Industry Minister Mrs Hodge, who was born in Egypt, said rules should "promote tolerance rather than inviting division".
She told the BBC she was aware it was a difficult issue, but she was trying to listen to her constituents' concerns and wanted to start a debate.
She said she understood the reasons why genuine refugees needed access to public resources, but said most new families were economic migrants who had chosen to come to Britain to live and work.
"In exercising that choice as an economic migrant, should they then presume to have automatic access immediately to public social housing?," she said.
"Of course it's true that we need to develop more social housing," she said.
"But however much social housing you do create, you will nevertheless have to take decisions to ration what will always be a finite resource."
How many so-called economic migrants (an obnoxious term introduced by the Thatcher government but which the Blair government is equally happy to use) actually require and are eligible for social housing? This seems just like an excuse to pander to the tabloid press, and it would be interesting to know how expensive this policy is going to be to implement.
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