To most British politicians, the name Millbank conjures a trip to Millbank Studios – a neoclassical wedding cake of a building down the road from Big Ben, where broadcasters run their parliamentary coverage. A ten-minute walk away, however, is a site of greater significance to politics today. The Millbank Estate, one of Britain’s earliest council estates, is a collection of Edwardian redbrick mansion blocks of 562 homes, around half of which are still council flats. If you buy a house in Westminster, you’ll pay on average £1.4m. If you pay social rent in a Westminster Council flat, it costs you £113 a week.
This is unusual. In London, unlike Paris or Rome, social housing blocks are jigsawed around some of the most desirable postcodes in the capital – with the poorest residents living in the heart of the city, rather than shoved out to banlieues. To clear slums and make room for a rising urban population, social housing began transforming the topography of British cities in the late-19th century, and boomed after the Second World War. This was a “golden age”, as the journalist Vicky Spratt wrote in her book Tenants, when council houses were “deliberately aspirational”.
But that aspiration soon curdled into resentment. Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy allowed councils to sell off their stock, which they failed to replace. Today, waiting lists for a council house are at a decade high in London. And with runaway housing inflation making both buying and renting a struggle, property is now a precious commodity. Politicians such as Robert Jenrick weave a narrative that British citizens are losing out on it to foreigners. “Social housing should be for Brits,” he declared on X. Nigel Farage lamented on GB News that 64.6 per cent of social housing tenants in Earl’s Court, in London’s priciest borough of Kensington and Chelsea, were “born outside the United Kingdom”.
The idea that immigrants are prioritised over British nationals for social housing is what the academic Rob Ford calls a “zombie myth”: it refuses to die. The 2021 Census found just 7 per cent of people in social housing in England and Wales had a non-UK passport (compared to 10 per cent of non-UK passport holders in the general population). It’s also untrue that recent migrants are filling spots: almost all social housing tenants born abroad have been living in Britain for decades. Most new arrivals have “no recourse to public funds” and so can’t claim benefits or apply for a council house.
The zombiest stat of all is that nearly half of London’s council housing is occupied by non-Brits. The Telegraph had to run a correction after repeating this bogus story in June. The accurate figure is that 48 per cent of London’s social housing is occupied by foreign-born heads of household (the person who fills in the Census form). Hardly surprising, given 49 per cent of the capital’s households include someone born overseas.
Being born overseas doesn’t stop you or your children being British. If having a foreign-born parent makes you a migrant, that includes Charles III. If having a foreign-born person in your household makes you a family of migrants, then that includes, erm, Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage. The left is guilty of this conflation too: memes celebrating immigrant talent appear when the England football team does well, forgetting that Bukayo Saka and Kobbie Mainoo aren’t immigrants at all.
It’s long been a tactic of the hard right to incite racial tension over housing. And there is a major shortage of social housing: more than 1.3 million households in England are waiting for a council home. Coupled with net migration reaching a record high post-Brexit, it is easy to scapegoat migrants for the social housing deficit. It’s certainly easier than building more social housing, better maintenance of existing stock and improving living conditions – something the council tenants, private renters and leaseholders alike want on the estate where I live, which is still partly social housing. Whether we’re barbecuing sausages on a Sunday or breaking our fast with an evening iftar feast, we are united in British grumbling about the state of the bins when they go uncollected the next day.
I heard a similar story from those living on and around the Boundary Estate, Britain’s first social housing scheme, in east London’s Bethnal Green. More than half the flats in these handsome Arts and Crafts blocks – designed by Owen Fleming, the same architect behind its Millbank companion – are still social housing. Residents of Singaporean, Bangladeshi, Turkish and English origin I met told me diversity isn’t the problem; any tensions they relayed weren’t along ethnic lines. Instead, they mentioned the competing priorities of families with young children and those enjoying the Shoreditch nightlife, or collective frustration over mould, damp and crumbling brickwork.
“I find the diversity enriching, and I’m from the ‘indigenous population’,” said Jean, with wry air quotes. She has lived on the Boundary Estate since 1983 and seen the waves of migration, from descendants of Jews fleeing the Nazis to Bangladeshis arriving in the Sixties. When she moved to the area, the National Front would meet nearby. “The only violence I’ve seen is from white mobs,” she told me. “People here were wary but isolated from that. It’s always been a mixed community, and everybody has got along. It’s like a little island.” A cultural mix is part of London’s appeal: perhaps that’s why the populist right is so angry at the thought of losing out on living there.
[See more: Don’t tell Emmanuel Macron – but he’s a normal politician now]
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This article appears in the 09 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Harbinger