Changes to the planning laws

Debate is currently raging (not too strong a word) about consultations on changes to the planning laws, with a presumed consent to development.

Any Questions yesterday on BBC Radio 4 had all the panellests saying "we need to build more homes".  All the commentators in the newspapers are saying "we need to build more houses".  A massive editorial in the Observer today says that home ownership is falling as a percentage of the population.

What none of these commentators are talking about is why there is such a demand for housing.  Specifically no-one is mentioning the uncontrolled rate of inward migration.  Presumably they are afraid of the moronic chorus of "racist, racist, racist" that goes up whenever anyone tries to discuss the impact that immigration is having.

The reason there is a crisis in housing is because there is a crisis in immigration.

You cannot see net immigration of a quarter of a million people per year (year after year) and not expect to have an extreme shortage of affordable housing.  In the local town near where I live there are Polish people living ten or twelve per three-bedroom house, in the countryside Latvians are crammed in caravans in the yards of packhouses, and until recently we had homeless eastern Europeans living in tents in the scrubland behind the Co-Op (no idea where they have gone to).

The cost of building houses for these new people must be charged to the employees who are hiring them at such extremely low salaries (maybe increase employers National Insurance contributions for everyone they employ born outside the United Kingdom).