Reform’s plan to ban foreign nationals from social housing ‘racist and morally wrong’, Shelter says

Ms Elliott said: “This is another attempt to distract from the real cause of the housing emergency, which is the decades-long failure to build enough genuinely affordable social homes.”

She added that the “divisive” plans “risk kicking thousands of our friends, neighbours and colleagues out of their homes, and the communities they are part of, without justification”. 

“This would lead to increasing homelessness, put extreme pressure on councils and rip apart the fabric of our country for no reason.

“Politicians need to stop using the housing emergency to score political points. There is a clear way for us to actually ensure everyone has access to the safe, secure and affordable home they need and that is to build 90,000 social rent homes a year for 10 years,” she said.

Fiona Colley, director of social change at Homeless Link, said that contrary to claims made by Mr Farage, the evidence is that minoritised communities are “far more likely to be homeless than white households”.

She said: “The UK has a broken housing system with extreme shortages of social housing. This has not been caused by immigration, but by decades of underinvestment and loss of homes to the Right to Buy.

“We need change in our housing and homelessness systems, not with divisive policies that will only cause more homelessness, but through building new homes and investing in high-quality support services needed to prevent and end homelessness for everyone.”

Gavin Smart, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Housing, said access to social housing in England is already governed by “clear legal eligibility and allocation rules, with the vast majority of homes let to UK citizens and priority given to those in greatest need”. 

He added: “Allocation is based on citizenship and legal eligibility – not place of birth. It’s important to recognise that many UK citizens – including well-known public figures like Boris Johnson and Joanna Lumley – were born outside the UK.

“Proposals that would remove security of tenure from people who are lawfully resident risk increasing homelessness, placing additional pressure on local authorities and undermining community stability. 

“The evidence is clear that the primary driver of the housing crisis is a long-standing shortage of genuinely affordable homes, not the nationality of those who occupy them.”

He urged all policymakers to “focus on increasing the supply of social and affordable housing, supporting local allocation systems to meet need fairly, and ensuring that housing policy remains practical, lawful and rooted in evidence”. 

Separately, Robina Qureshi, chief executive of Positive Action in Housing, condemned the “shameful” attacks on people of colour in Glasgow last week by gangs of masked men.

She said: “Reform UK and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain will not condemn these racist gangs, you can be sure. 

“Instead of focusing on the crime, they capitalise on those crimes committed by people of colour, immigrants or Muslims. That’s their specialism – targeting racial minorities.

“That is racism and it distracts ordinary people from seeing who is really draining the wealth of our society and destroying public services.”

She added that the events are “not happening in a vacuum”. 

“Genocide scholars have long warned that mass atrocities begin not with killing, but with classification, scapegoating, dehumanisation and polarisation. 

“We are at stage five or six of that continuum. The first step is dividing society into ‘us’ and ‘them’, followed by the collective blaming of entire communities for the actions of individuals.

“When people are encouraged to view their neighbours as suspects, discrimination and violence become easier to justify,” she said. 

In April, following an exclusive interview with Inside Housing, Reform’s housing spokesperson was sacked from this position in the party over comments he made about Grenfell Tower.