It’s supposed to be the Tory housing week, with David Cameron setting out plans to double the number of discounted starter homes to 200,000. It’s an important, salient issue to make election promises on. But more salient is immigration, and somehow the Tories are having to talk about that again today.
Today’s Times contains a plea by Ken Clarke that Cameron drop the Tory target to drive net migration into the ‘tens of thousands’, given its failure in this parliament. Ministers have oscillated between blaming the Lib Dems and blaming Europe for missing the target (they could also blame the growing economy, as Fraser explains here) and David Cameron did closely tie controlling immigration to European reform in his speech before Christmas.
How does Cameron deal with this? Well, in one sense, the Prime Minister is dealing with one of the sources of discontent about immigration today by making announcements on housing supply, given many objections to uncontrolled immigration stem from frustration at poor access to new homes, schools and other services.
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