The government clearly pledged to get control of immigration and reduce levels. But the opposite is happening. Uncapped and unmanageable routes into the UK are opened regularly, and the chaos in the English Channel means boats with thousands of uninvited guests arriving more and more frequently (See Tracking Station).
Ongoing mass immigration, and uncontrolled borders, threaten to destroy your quality of life:
1. It pushes housing costs up.
Immigration at the present rising scale helps to make the present cost of living crisis worse, through higher costs to rent and buy a home.
An official government publication, published in 2018, shows that, between 1991 and 2016, immigration drove up UK house prices by a fifth between 1991 and 2016:
‘…the increase in the non-UK born population in England is expected to have led to a 21% increase in house prices, all else being equal’.
Indeed, rapid population growth has added hugely to the UK’s mounting housing crisis, and polling shows that the public know it. Immigration means that we need to build a new home every six minutes just to cope with the high level of arrivals from overseas (read more in our briefing paper on projected housing demand).
2. Uncontrolled immigration means billions of tax money wasted on shocking ABUSE of our asylum system and NHS
Costly asylum chaos
UK taxpayers are paying £3.5 million per day (nearly £1.3 billion per year) to pay for hotels for 25,000 asylum seekers, many of whom entered via illicit routes (such as by boat) without permission from safe countries in Europe.
Many of those coming illegally across the English Channel (the Home Office admits that 70,000 have done so during the past four years – 2018 to 2022 – by boat and lorry) were rejected for asylum in Europe but are then put immediately into UK accommodation with all bills and expenses paid by you (often in four-star resorts) while they await the outcome of their fresh asylum application in the UK. Those supported can also get immediate access to the NHS, and may get free (i.e. taxpayer-funded) taxi trips to appointments, free use of a mobile phone and even yoga classes (!)
This on top of the millions in administration costs and legal aid directed towards the many who are flagrantly abusing our asylum system with unfounded, spurious or vexatious claims – see briefing papers on the rising costs of our overwhelmed and abused asylum system (here and here).
No wonder the cost of our overwhelmed, abused and backlogged asylum system has risen so much in recent years.
The NHS
Our overwhelmed and abused NHS means a lot of wasted tax money which could otherwise go towards protecting and improving the UK’s quality of life.
The cost of NHS care for the entire immigrant population in the UK was just under £19 billion in 2014/15 and likely increased since then. In 2012, the cost of the NHS translators was £60,000 per day (or £22 million per year!) – see article.
Treating illegal immigrants cost £330 million per year, according to a 2014 government document. Again the hit for taxpayers is likely more now given the large rise in illegal arrivals.
Separately, health tourism drains the NHS of hundreds of millions per year because hospitals fail to identify overseas patients or never send them demands for payment (you can read more by clicking this summary on health tourism and a piece about pressure on the NHS and other services).
It is an open wound for our cherished NHS.
3. It drives a population crush which leads to increasing gridlock and the loss of green space
We’re losing the precious countryside that makes the UK so beautiful and special.
The UK population is now a record 67 million and has risen by eight million in the past two decades. About seven million of this was the result – directly or indirectly – of uncontrolled, mass immigration.
That means about 80% to 90% of population increase is down to the impact of mass arrivals from overseas.
Britain is already the most crowded large country in Europe. A YouGov Tracking Poll found in April 2021, that 56% of Brits still think the immigration trends of the last decade have been too high. Part of the reason is likely to be the fact that the UK’s quality of life has suffered significantly in the midst of rapid population growth as:
- Overcrowding has increased (England is now the fifth most densely populated country in the world – not including small islands and city states – right up there with Taiwan, South Korea and Rwanda, and Bangladesh at number one.)
- Traffic congestion has worsened – The traffic data company Inrix found that London is now the most congested city on the planet and the worsening traffic has led the government to make foolish decisions to ‘upgrade’ roads into ‘smart motorways’ by removing the hard shoulder – making driving less safe and putting families at risk.
- Our green space is eaten up as myopic developers cash in – In the midst of this we are losing our green fields at a rapid rate as developers cash in on the spiking housing demand – the total land area in the green belt which was set aside for development by councils in 2015-20 amounted to nearly 60 square miles (more than three times the area of the London Borough of Brent) – see our blog.
This is all without even mentioning the public safety nightmare created by the sheer inability to verify the identify of the tens of thousands who have come illegally by boat, air and lorry – made worse by the tendency of those coming to deliberately destroy ID documents.
We have seen crimes and terror attacks committed by those who abused our asylum system and broke into the UK (see summary). The government is negligent for allowing this to continue and get worse.
This situation is completely unsustainable. Those in charge must restore border control, and fast.