It may have taken nearly a year after Margaret Hodge’s ‘they come over here taking our housing’ outburst, but it turns out that she was wrong (and I was right, so there).

The early findings of a major survey into social housing allocation ordered by the Equality and Human Rights Commission are that:

There is no evidence in the research of any abuse of the system including “queue jumping” to the significant detriment of any group, including white families.

and that

new migrants made up less than 2 per cent of the total number of people in social housing throughout the UK. Around 90 per cent of those living in social housing are born in the UK.

In fact, 11 per cent of new migrants have been allocated social housing compared with 17 per cent of UK born residents, which, given the relative income spread between new migrants and UK born residents in general, suggests that the disparity is even greater than these figures suggest.

Eminent sense is talked by a spokesman for Barking & Dagenham Council:

We know that that view [of the system being unfair] is wrong but part of the way of putting it right is to find out why they felt that in the first place.

Of course, actually doing something practical about it would help too. Like there being more social housing.

So what did Hodge actually accomplish? She managed to legitimise the fear-mongering venom of the BNP in the area. A heartfelt ‘top work’ for that, Margaret.