Why won't Rachel Reeves admit we need so many new homes because of immigration? says STEPHEN GLOVER

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There was a word ­missing in Rachel Reeves’s widely trumpeted speech on Monday about radical new planning rules, and yet almost nobody has remarked on its absence.

The new Chancellor intends to ­concrete over England with new houses. That largely means over already crowded southern England, where many people want to live.

Part of the Green Belt will be ­sacrificed to the manic house-building programme planned by Labour, though Ms Reeves tried to sweeten the pill by describing it as ‘grey belt’. Ah, so only grey trees will be felled.

The new Chancellor Rachel Reeve will sacrifice part of the Green Belt to enable a manic house-building programme

What was the missing word that our bulldozing Chancellor couldn’t bring herself to utter, the ­unmentionable phenomenon that lurks unspoken behind her plans?

Immigration.

If there were little net immigration — if it amounted, as David Cameron promised, to ‘tens of thousands’ annually — there would be no need for Rachel Reeves and Housing ­Secretary Angela Rayner to blanket fields and meadows with new housing.

Wouldn’t it have been more honest of the Chancellor to acknowledge the effect of uncontrolled immigration on the demand for new dwellings, as well as on rising house prices and the ever higher cost of renting?

If she’d said something along the lines of ‘I support large-scale immigration, and accept it means we will have to build more homes to accommodate the people coming here’ —well, at least I could have respected her candour, even if I do not endorse her ideas.

Stephen Glover (pictured) says it would be more honest of the Chancellor to acknowledge the effect of uncontrolled immigration on the demand for new dwellings, as well as on rising house prices and the ever higher cost of renting

No wonder so many people distrust politicians. Does Ms Reeves think we’re stupid? Discussing the housing shortage without referring to immigration is ­tantamount to talking about a need for new roads without mentioning cars.

The truth of the matter is that no government has built enough houses over the past 25 years because no government has been able to keep up with the dizzying increase in the number of immigrants arriving in this country.

They don’t all — in fact, very few of them do — end up in lock-up garages in Neasden. They need proper homes like the rest of us, to rent or buy, and, if there aren’t enough, the cost of renting and buying is driven up for everyone.

The Office for National Statistics ) ­forecasts that the UK population will rise from 67 million to nearly 74 million by 2036 - it says this extremely rapid growth will be due overwhelmingly to net migration

Even so cautious a figure as Bank of England chief economist, Huw Pill, recently said ‘quite large increases in immigration’ are exacerbating the housing crisis.

Earlier this year, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) ­forecast that the UK population will rise from 67 million at the time of the 2021 census to nearly 74 million by 2036. It says this extremely rapid growth will be due overwhelmingly to net migration.

The ONS assumes that this will fall from a record 745,000 in 2022 to about 315,000 by mid-2028, where it is expected to settle. An analysis of the ONS figures by the Right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies ­concludes that at least 5.7 million homes will have to be built by 2036, with net migration accounting for 41 per cent of the total.

That amounts to about 156,000 new homes a year, which is just over half the number of dwellings that Labour plans to build as it ­concretes over huge swathes

of England.

Labour might possibly reduce the annual figure for net ­migration to less than 315,000, but don’t bet on it. Its ­manifesto concedes that the UK is ‘overly dependent on workers from abroad’. It includes a ­commitment to reduce net migration from the ­unprecedentedly high levels reached under the Tories, though without any target.

The construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes in unspoilt countryside is simply because the Government won’t limit immigration to the kind of numbers we had a quarter of a century ago

This refusal to set targets suggests that Labour still hasn’t got the message that uncontrolled immigration is resented by so many.

There’s further evidence. The ­Government has announced that 90,000 illegal immigrants who had been left in limbo pending possible deportation to Rwanda will now be allowed to claim asylum in the UK.

It will be granted to the vast majority if the past is any guide. Meanwhile, following the ­Government’s scrapping of the Tories’ Rwanda scheme, it’s a racing certainty that numbers crossing the Channel will rise in the short term. In the longer term, Labour’s vague plans for better intelligence and increased co-operation with the French are unlikely to stem the tide.

As for legal immigration, although the Government will probably maintain restrictions belatedly introduced by the Tories, it plainly doesn’t have the stomach to slash numbers.

Tony Blair has just urged Sir Keir Starmer to bring in ­immigration controls because the public want them. He’s right, though he has a cheek to say so, given that ­untrammelled immigration took off during his premiership (something he tried to disavow on Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday morning).

I doubt that the PM will take Sir Tony’s advice. Overall immigration may decline somewhat, but not to manageable levels, not least because so many businesses still have an insatiable appetite for cheap foreign labour.

In fact, I forecast that the lack of any policy to deal with high levels of immigration will be a major cause of Labour’s plunging popularity in as little as two years. Reform UK, with its clear anti-immigration agenda, is bound to benefit.

But so, too, might the Tories if they succeed in convincing ­voters that, despite the errors of their ways in government, they are opposed to mass immigration, and don’t want to see England turned into a vast housing estate to ­accommodate incomers.

I don’t criticise all of Rachel Reeves’ proposals. A buoyant economy must have new development in the right places. It is absurd to continue to block a third runway at Heathrow. The Government is right to revive two thwarted planning appeals for data centres in Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire.

Some development is necessary if we’re going to remain a prosperous country, and let me say that the sacred protections accorded to bats and even ­spiders in construction projects are idiotic. But new development shouldn’t be plonked anywhere, and there’s enormous scope for better design.

What is unacceptable is the construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes in unspoilt countryside simply because the Government won’t limit immigration to the kind of numbers we had a quarter of a century ago.

As for onshore wind turbines, they are a scourge that offer minuscule benefits in return for the wanton despoiling of the English countryside. I hope people will rise up against these ghastly windmills ­wherever they are planned, and burn effigies of Ed Miliband, their destructive champion.

Poet Philip Larkin wrote in 1946 about the foreseeable destruction of England: ‘And that will be England gone / The shadows, the meadows, the lanes / The guildhalls, the carved choirs / There’ll be books; it will linger on / In galleries; but all that remains / For us will be concrete and tyres.’

Sir Keir Starmer has ­promised us straightforward government after the dishonesties of the later Tory years. And yet the first major speech by a senior member of the Cabinet set out to obscure a link that should inform debate.

The planned carpeting of parts of England with new homes can’t be disassociated from the uncontrolled immigration that Labour has no apparent intention of stopping. When will someone speak the truth?