Social housing in Wales is built with public money, constructed on public land, and subsidised by Welsh taxpayers. It exists as a safety net for vulnerable members of our communities. Yet, under the current legal framework, nationality and length of local residence play remarkably little role in determining who receives access to Wales’s increasingly scarce social housing stock.
When demand far outstrips supply and local families wait years on housing registers, it is time to champion a simple, fundamental principle: British citizens should come first.
The reality of Wales’s housing pressures is visible across the country. At the 2021 Census, even excluding students, more than one in four people living in shared private rented housing in Wales were born outside the United Kingdom. In places like Flintshire, Wrexham, and Newport, that proportion reached close to or more than half. Crucially, these figures pre-date both record immigration levels and the recent expansion of asylum dispersal accommodation to almost every Welsh local authority.
Today, around 3,000 asylum seekers are housed in dispersal accommodation across 21 of Wales’s 22 local authorities, including over 1,300 in Cardiff, 600 in Swansea, and 300 in Newport. These are not merely hotels; they include houses and HMOs situated on ordinary streets, operated by a single private company on behalf of the Home Office.
This matters because asylum accommodation providers actively compete for the same housing stock sought by Welsh families and local councils working to house the homeless. Clearsprings informed Parliament that around half of the new beds it secured replaced accommodation landlords had withdrawn, often where property owners received higher offers from private tenants or Government-backed contractors. When families across Wales are struggling to find somewhere affordable to live, that market distortion should concern everyone.
The issue, however, extends well beyond asylum accommodation. Recent responses from local councils regarding foreign nationals receiving housing support paint a revealing picture. In Cardiff, non-British citizens accounted for nearly 30 per cent of social housing lettings where nationality was recorded, and held over 30 per cent of total tenancies where nationality was known. In Newport, foreign nationals made up more than one in four people in temporary accommodation and almost one in five new social lettings with recorded nationality, while nearly 1,000 non-British nationals remain on the city’s housing waiting list.
Despite these growing figures, social housing allocation in Wales is still governed largely by Part 6 of the Housing Act 1996. While councils must give reasonable preference to people in housing need, there is no general requirement to have lived in Wales for any minimum period before qualifying.
England took a different path in 2011, at least empowering councils to set residency requirements for their housing registers. Wales did not do the same. Last year, Section 35 of the Homelessness and Social Housing Allocation Bill offered an opportunity to give Welsh councils similar powers, but it was removed at Stage 2 following an amendment by Siân Gwenllian, now the Minister responsible for housing.
The Minister has previously described social housing as a “universal resource.” It is not. It is a scarce, finite asset built and maintained by taxpayers. When demand outstrips supply, priorities must be set.
We in Reform UK Wales are committed to ending access to social housing for foreign nationals, requiring current foreign national tenants to find private accommodation within three months or face potential deportation. Under our proposed overhaul, the allocation criteria for both new and existing social housing will be fundamentally restructured to give explicit priority to veterans, working households, and married couples.
Furthermore, our policy will permanently close migrant hotels and overhaul HMO licensing to stop the spread of migrant-focused shared housing. Local authorities will be mandated to refuse, revoke, or suspend HMO licences whenever a landlord is caught knowingly housing illegal immigrants.
Against the backdrop of rising rents, homelessness, and years-long waiting lists, asking whether those who have lived, worked, and contributed here should receive priority is entirely legitimate. Putting Welsh taxpayers and British citizens first with housing is common sense.
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