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Raab immigration calculations sourced from quango abolished in 2010
Dominic Raab’s claim that immigration has pushed up house prices by 20% in 25 years relied on a model produced by a quango abolished in 2010, the government has said.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, however, has refused to publish this model or the statistics produced from it.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) told Inside Housing: “Basically, the figure was produced using an analytical model originally produced by the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU), which incorporates ONS [Office for National Statistics] housing supply statistics.
“So it’s not something that can be found online – or in published stats. Our officials provided it to [Mr Raab] ahead of his interview.”
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The NHPAU was abolished in 2010 in one of the coalition government’s first acts as part of a ‘bonfire of the quangos’.
Sir Stephen Nickell, who was chair of the body, gave evidence on this issue to the Select Committee on Economic Affairs in 2007 and 2008.
His written evidence refers to the NHPAU model used for Mr Raab’s claim and suggests that a 1% increase in the number of households raises house prices by 2%, all else being equal.
In October 2007, Sir Stephen told the committee: “Doing a bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I found the following: if there had been no net migration since 2000, then instead of house prices rising over the period from four times average earnings to seven times average earnings, the calculation I did suggests that house prices would have risen to around six-and-a-half times average earnings.”
Sir Stephen added: “You do not solve the housing problem by curtailing immigration.”
The final report published by the committee concluded: “We note the forecasts that, if current rates of net immigration persist, 20 years hence house prices would be over 10% higher than what they would be if there were zero net immigration.”
Sir Stephen has previously criticised leading Brexiters for misrepresenting his research on the effect of immigration on wages.
An ONS spokesperson directed Inside Housing to an article posted on its website in May last year about immigration and housing, which states: “There are a range of further factors, mentioned in this section, which could also affect prices and rents.
“This means it is not possible to directly infer impact from the data we report on in this article.”
Inside Housing has asked MHCLG if it plans to publish the NHPAU model and the figures produced with it.
