Claim: Stopping Net Immigration Would “Solve the Housing Crisis”
Summary of the Claim
In 2024, Rupert Lowe repeatedly argued that Britain does not have a housing crisis but an immigration crisis, implying that cutting or stopping immigration is the key to fixing housing. In broadcast interviews and posts on X, he has framed immigration as the primary cause of high house prices and rents, and contrasted this with what he calls “plastering the countryside with houses.”
In a TalkTV interview headlined “STOP Legal And Illegal Immigration To Tackle Britain’s Housing Crisis,” Lowe suggested that halting both legal and illegal immigration is essential to dealing with housing pressures.
This fact-check examines whether stopping net immigration would in fact solve the UK’s housing crisis.
Where the Claim Comes From
On social media, Lowe has posted several versions of the same line:
- “We do not have a housing crisis, we have an immigration crisis.”
- “We do not need to plaster the countryside with houses, we need to significantly reduce the number of people coming here.”
These messages have been widely shared in Reform-supporting networks, often accompanied by comments that the “housing crisis disappears” if immigration is stopped.
Commentary in UK and US think-tank outlets has picked up on “Rupert Lowe’s line” as emblematic of a growing political narrative that treats immigration levels as the main cause of the housing crisis.
Verdict: ❌ False
Stopping net immigration would not solve the UK’s housing crisis.
Immigration clearly adds to demand for homes and can intensify pressure in some areas, but the core of the crisis is a historic failure to build enough housing over many decades. Official and independent analyses show a multi-million home shortfall that would still exist even if net migration fell to zero. Cutting immigration might modestly reduce future demand growth, but it does not create the missing homes or fix the planning system.
The claim that simply stopping net immigration would “solve” the crisis is therefore ❌ False.
Evidence and Analysis
1. The scale of the housing shortfall
The UK has a very large accumulated housing shortage.
- Centre for Cities estimates a backlog of about 4.3 million missing homes in Britain, homes that were never built compared with typical European levels.
- More recent work suggests the UK-wide shortfall may now be closer to 6.5 million homes, given continued underbuilding.
- Government statistics show that England added around 221,000 net additional dwellings in 2023–24, below both past peaks and below the often-cited 300,000 per year target.
This shortage has built up over many decades, long before the recent spike in net migration. It reflects restrictive planning rules, slow approvals, underinvestment in social housing and the long-term failure to build enough homes where people want to live.
Stopping net immigration does not eliminate these structural problems or produce millions of new homes.
2. Immigration’s real impact on housing
Immigration does affect housing demand.
- The Office for National Statistics has reported that net migration added roughly 2.5 million people to the UK population in just four years after 2020, which inevitably increases demand for housing.
- Some analysis suggests that over recent years a large share of additional housing demand has come from migration, intensifying pressure where supply is already constrained.
But the relationship is not as simple as “more migrants equals higher prices everywhere.” Academic and policy research finds:
- In some local areas, immigration is associated with lower house prices, because higher inflows prompt some higher-income residents to move elsewhere, reducing local demand.
- Migrants are more likely than UK-born residents to live in private rented housing rather than owning, which concentrates pressure in particular segments of the market rather than across the board.
Most importantly, experts repeatedly stress that the housing crisis is fundamentally about supply, not just demand.
3. What happens if net immigration were zero?
Housing specialists have explicitly asked what would have happened if immigration had been much lower or even zero.
- A former head of the National Housing Federation wrote in Inside Housing that “even if net immigration had been zero, we would still have a housing crisis and a broken market,” because the UK has consistently failed to build enough homes.
- Policy research for Parliament and independent think tanks concludes that planning restrictions and decades of low building are the primary reason for the current backlog; immigration is a contributing factor, not the root cause.
Even authors who are highly critical of high net migration acknowledge that immigration control alone is no substitute for large increases in housebuilding and planning reform.
Zero net immigration might slow future growth in housing demand, but it does nothing to erase the millions of homes we have already failed to build, nor does it fix planning bottlenecks, construction capacity, or affordability for low income households.
4. Why the “immigration crisis, not housing crisis” frame is misleading
Rupert Lowe’s framing flips cause and effect. By saying “we do not have a housing crisis, we have an immigration crisis,” he implies that housing problems would largely vanish if immigration stopped.
The evidence shows a different picture:
- The UK had serious affordability and overcrowding problems long before the recent spike in net migration.
- Countries with much tighter immigration controls can still have severe housing shortages if they underbuild or heavily restrict development.
- Multiple studies show that planning reform and sustained higher building rates are essential to closing the gap, whatever happens to migration.
Immigration is one important variable among many. Treating it as the single lever that can “solve” the crisis is not supported by credible evidence.
Conclusion
Rupert Lowe and others on the anti-immigration right argue that stopping net immigration would solve the housing crisis. The data do not back this up.
The UK’s housing crisis is driven primarily by a very large, long-term shortage of homes caused by decades of underbuilding and a restrictive planning system. High net migration in recent years has added to demand and intensified pressures, especially in some high-demand areas, but it is not the underlying cause of the multi-million home shortfall.
Reducing immigration might slightly ease future demand growth, but without major reforms to planning and a sustained expansion in housebuilding, the crisis will continue. The claim that stopping net immigration would solve the housing crisis is therefore ❌ False.
Sources
• Rupert Lowe on X – “We do not have a housing crisis, we have an immigration crisis” and related posts
https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1788229650746855629
https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1885355144319009161
• Centre for Cities – “The housebuilding crisis: The UK’s 4 million missing homes”
• Migration Observatory, University of Oxford – “Migrants and housing in the UK”
• Centre for Cities and related analysis on shortfall and planning
• Ryan Bourne, Cato Institute – “Planning reform bigger than immigration in tackling housing crisis”