Planning Minister: Govt must be tough on new migrants to protect housing from more pressure

MPs’ concerns about how many Bulgarian and Romanian migrants might come to this country when transitional controls are lifted aren’t going away any time soon, by the looks of things. There were six questions on the order paper from Conservative MPs about the matter at Home Office questions yesterday, for starters. But I’ve also spoken to a minister who is uneasy about the impact that the end of the controls will have on his own sector. Planning Minister Nick Boles told me:

‘Put it this way, we should have been more worried than we were about the pressure on housing and other public services from the last set of entrant countries and [Labour] went into that with, you know, deep complacency as a government… and ended up in a very, very difficult situation… the ripples from which are going to literally affect an entire generation, the fact that 1.7 million people moved into England alone in one decade and need housing, and you know, they are British now, they are certainly British residents and many of them will be British citizens now.