Reform UK proposes evicting foreign tenants from social housing

Nigel Farage has put social housing at the centre of Reform UK’s migration drive, saying foreign nationals in council and housing-association homes would have three months to find private accommodation or face possible deportation. The plan, set out in a Substack essay on Sunday, June 14, 2026, lands in a housing system already shaped by strict eligibility rules and would face immediate tests in housing law and rights protections if a Reform government tried to apply it.

Reform said it would prioritise veterans, long-term local residents, domestic abuse survivors and care-leavers for social housing. But the proposal goes further than a simple allocation shift: reporting said it would apply retrospectively, regardless of how long someone has lived in the UK, as part of Reform’s wider pledge to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain.

The policy sits awkwardly beside the current structure of social housing. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said in January 2026 that nearly nine in ten social homes go to UK nationals. It also said migrants arriving on student or work visas are not eligible for social housing, and neither are people who enter illegally with no leave to remain. That means the debate is less about a broad open door than about a limited pool of households already filtered through residency and local connection rules.

Even so, the scale of non-UK tenancy in social housing is not negligible. The Migration Observatory said the share of new social housing lettings in England going to lead tenants with a non-UK nationality rose from 6% in 2007/08 to 10% in 2022/23. It said 15% of people living in social housing were born outside the UK in 2021, and that in 2024/25 non-UK citizens were the head of 22% of households assessed as homeless or at risk of homelessness. A parliamentary written answer in 2025 put the number of England households with a non-UK-national lead tenant in social housing at 431,000 in 2023/24, equal to 10.4% of all social housing households.

The proposal has already drawn political fire. Lisa Nandy, speaking on Sky News, said Farage should take his “nasty hate and anger and division” elsewhere. Suella Braverman praised the piece, underscoring the split the issue has opened on the right as Reform hardens its line on migration and housing during the Makerfield byelection campaign.

Fact-checkers have also knocked back a related claim that most London social housing goes to foreign nationals, saying it was wrong because many foreign-born social tenants hold British passports. That correction matters because it points to the central weakness in Farage’s pitch: the politics are blunt, but the housing data are more complicated, and any attempt to turn status into an eviction trigger would collide with that complexity fast.