Posts Tagged ‘Dominic Raab’

Dominic Raab has been caught fiddling the figures on house prices and immigration

13/04/2018, 06:37:49 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Dominic Raab is a fool.

He’s a fool for thinking he could say house prices have risen by 21% because of immigration over the past 25 years and not have to answer follow-up questions on the provenance of this number. It’s a striking figure, of course people are going to ask for the source data.

To not anticipate that his Sunday Times interview would generate a chorus of questions from opposition politicians, journalists and think tankers, shows an amazing inability to think through the political consequences of his actions.

He’s a fool for not understanding that the UK Statistics Authority has a remit to police the misuse of government statistics and that his department, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is mandated to comply with their rigorous code of practice.

A scintilla of comprehension about the role of the Authority would have meant he’d have known that they would publicly slap him down ,as the questions rained down, for not publishing the data and force the department to make it available.

Most of all though, he’s a fool for cherry-picking this figure from research which, now the department has published it, makes the exact opposite point to the one he aired in his interview – immigration actually has a comparatively small impact on house prices.

The research ascribes three factors as driving house price rises: domestic population growth, population growth from net migration and increasing real incomes.

Out of a total increase of £97,000 1991-2016, £80,000 is from increasing real incomes, £11,000 is from population growth driven by net migration and £6,000 from domestic population growth.

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