Why Reform’s social-housing plans have touched a nerve

Reform UK’s pledge to prioritise British-born workers for social housing has proven predictably provocative. Announced this week, Reform has said that it would look to move working people under 35 and married couples with children up the social-housing queue. This comes hot on the heels of a previously announced policy to exclude foreign nationals from social housing altogether.

Reform appears to have crossed a significant new line. Britain may already discriminate between ‘British citizen by descent’ and otherwise. But up to now, no major party has mooted creating two kinds of citizens – British-born and foreign-born – for the purpose of allocating public services.

Reform’s potential creation of ‘two tiers’ of citizenship could have drastic implications across the British state. After all, once a distinction is made for social housing, why stop there? Perhaps other rights, entitlements or welfare policies could be similarly affected. Even voting could be, in principle, restricted.

The unintended consequences could be just as impactful. The category of ‘foreign-born’ casts a wide net. It could apply to those who arrived as small children who consider themselves, and would be considered by others, totally British. It could even apply to children of British citizens who happened to be out of the country when their child was born. Both in theory and in practice, this policy proposal needs proper scrutiny.

But the underlying impetus behind Reform’s proposal is clear. It is a part of an attempt to undo the tremendous damage that has been done to the social contract in this country by the total devaluation of the concept of citizenship.

This devaluation has been carried out by successive governments, each deeply suspicious of, and often hostile to, patriotic and national sentiments – the very things that give meaning to a nation. Anything connected to the peculiarly British national experience – from the Magna Carta to the British Empire – has either been downplayed or denigrated. As a result, citizenship has been hollowed out, reduced to a legal, administrative category – open to anyone and not conferring any special rights or obligations. Just about the only special privilege open to citizens is the right to vote (and even this is extended to Irish and Commonwealth citizens who are in the UK legally).

At the same time, the state has actively devalued British citizenship by engaging in a de facto open-borders experiment. This has made a mockery of one of the most fundamental features of citizenship – the right to share in the decision as to who enters your territory. And it has practically undermined citizenship by making it available to increasingly large numbers of people.

Indeed, Britain has recently been handing out citizenship on an unprecedented scale. In 2024 alone, 269,621 people became British citizens – the highest number since the Home Office began collecting data in 2005. In 2025, 236,512 people became British citizens. Those numbers will likely rise further should any government set about reforming ‘indefinite leave to remain’ – a permanent resident status currently given to anyone who has lived here for five years or more.

Many British people now intuit that this mass devaluation of citizenship has changed the rules of the game – that being a British citizen ain’t what it used to be. They feel that newcomers are able to game the system. The stats substantiate this feeling. According to the 2021 Census, 48 per cent of household heads in social housing in London, and 19 per cent nationwide, were born outside the UK. That over half of these household heads are British passport holders and have lived in the UK for a long time does not diminish the sense of unfairness felt by many members of the general public.

It certainly doesn’t seem right that we have a social-housing system, especially in London, that seems to prioritise the interests of new or recent arrivals over those of citizens with deep historical ties to this country.

Indeed, local councils seem to be prioritising ever newer groups of arrivals for social housing. A regeneration project in Tower Hamlets is aimed almost exclusively at Bangladeshis. Even more incredibly, it is not just a regeneration project that happens to benefit people who happen to be Bangladeshi – the planning application is shot through with references to the supposed specific needs of the Bangladeshi community and has been ‘specifically arranged for Bangladeshi families’.

Britain is now in the position of trying to operate a national welfare state while becoming increasingly reluctant to say that the national community itself has any distinctive claim on it. That contradiction could perhaps be ignored when immigration was limited and ‘naturalisation’ was rare. It is much harder to ignore after an era of mass migration and historically high levels of citizenship grants.

It is in the context of the hollowing out of citizenship that Reform’s creation of a potential two-tier citizenship needs to be understood. We are facing a near-unprecedented challenge. Our political elites, by opening Britain’s borders and devaluing citizenship, have caused enormous damage. Undoing it is going to require us to think creatively, and we are going to sometimes need to step outside the straitjacket of recent policy.

Of course, we need to be very careful. The implications of such a policy, if handled badly, could be dire. But at the very least, Reform’s proposal should be the start of a widespread conversation about what British citizenship means and whether the policies of the past decades have cheapened or strengthened it. One thing is certain: the status quo cannot continue.