Don't let migrants jump the housing queue, says minister

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Margaret Hodge: Immigrants shouldn't queue-jump

British families should be given council housing ahead of immigrants, a Labour minister has claimed.

Margaret Hodge risked a race row by warning that it was "unfair" when new arrivals jumped to the top of the queue - leaving no homes for families in Britain for generations.

She said a points system giving weight to length of residence, citizenship and National Insurance contributions would be a better way of allocating homes.

Mrs Hodge, who represents Barking in East London, a hive of British National Party activity, said this would help tackle alarm in the "poorest white communities" who felt angry and neglected by the Government.

Her comments were described as "hypocritical" as it was pointed out that Labour had presided over a massive rise in immigration at the same time as its "catastrophic" failure to build enough affordable homes.

Official figures show soaring immigration has pushed up the British population by nearly one and half million in a decade - although even these statistics have been criticised as unreliable.

Industry Minister Mrs Hodge demanded an urgent shake-up of the council and social housing system which prioritises the needs of migrant families.

She said: "A recently-arrived family with four or five children living in a damp and overcrowded privatelyrented flat with the children suffering from asthma will usually get priority over a family with less housing need who have lived in the area for three generations and are stuck at home with the grandparents.

"We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.

"A lot of black and Asian British people feel as strongly as some of my white families do - that there is an essential unfairness in the system.

"They feel they've grown up in the borough, they're entitled to a home, and that sense of entitlement is often overridden by a real need of new immigrant families who come in, perhaps locked into private accommodation, poor accommodation, overcrowded."

Hundreds of voters in Barking, one of Britain's most deprived communities, had turned to the BNP amid concerns over housing allocation, she said.

Mrs Hodge is the daughter of Jewish parents who fled Nazi Germany for Egypt before arriving in England in 1949, when she was five.

Last year she caused controversy by claiming that Labour's failure to deal with immigration and the lack of affordable housing had prompted traditional working-class white voters to desert to the BNP.

She won cautious support from Labour chairman and deputy leadership candidate Hazel Blears, who said: "You have got to look at allocations policies to show that they are fair. People in this country want to know the system actually works for them."

Liberal Democrat frontbencher Simon Hughes said: "The worst cause of racial strife and antagonism is when new social property is built and when people who appear to have no link with the community move into it, when other people who may be desperately needing to move, can't get a move."

But Keith Vaz, chairman of the Labour Party's Ethnic Minority Taskforce, said: "Many people will find what Margaret Hodge has said offensive. As a minister in a Government committed to equality she has the capacity to deal with any unfairness - if indeed it exists."

Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman, said: "Margaret Hodge is admitting the long-term failure of this Government to control immigration.

"This is why Conservatives are calling for an explicit annual limit on the numbers coming here from outside the EU so that we can avoid exactly the sort of problems she is talking about."

 

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