State House occupies a prized hilltop location in central Freetown. As befits the official home of the President and First Lady of Sierra Leone, the colonial-era residence includes wide verandas, arched colonnades and ceremonial lawns, embodying – as the official website proudly describes – ‘imperial grandeur’.
Ensuring that foreigners are not put above Brits removes one of the most egregious council housing injustices
You might ask why a lady blessed with such an abode might want a second property in Walworth, South London. But wherever Sierra Leone’s First Lady chooses to spend her time shopping, any sensible country would conclude that she has quite enough moolah to buy own accommodation.
But then we are no longer a sensible country. So it is that Fatima Bio rented a council flat from 2007 until the British press got wind of it in 2025. It took Southwark council’s housing investigations team 12 months to conclude Fatima Bui was indeed Sierra Leone’s First Lady and that she might not need the property when there are 18,000 people on Southwark’s housing waiting list.
Kemi Badenoch has announced that a future Tory government would end council housing for foreigners, evicting more than 230,000 non-EU foreign households to free up supply. This, the Tories said, would ensure the UK is no longer treated as a ‘cash machine for the world’. The new Tory policy mirrors that already announced by Reform a couple of months ago, though Reform are proposing to go further by not granting any exception for EU settled-status holders (and simultaneously abolishing Indefinite Leave to Remain). Under Reform’s plan, those who refuse to vacate would also risk losing their right to remain in the country. That sounds reasonable to me, if they refuse to abide by the law of the land.
It is good the Tories have got with the programme. They have said ineligible tenants would be expected to move out of their homes within six months. Any single person who is not a UK, Irish or EU citizen would lose their council house. So too would couples, where neither of them are UK or EU citizens. But anyone with EU settled status would not be evicted. This exemption appears to less a point of principle and more pragmatism to avoid breaching the UK-EU Withdrawal Agreement. Morally, the carve-out for EU citizens does sit oddly and Zia Yusuf has wasted no time in pointing out the implication that ‘if you’re Bulgarian, broke, and came here in 2020, you should get a council house’.
Estimates suggest that there are about 470,000 non-UK and non-Irish citizens living in social housing in England (in total, England contains more than four million socially rented homes). In London’s council homes, around 48 per cent of lead tenants were born outside the UK. There are still myriad other scandals around the provision of council housing; not least with many unemployed people living in central London paying rents a tiny fraction of what they would otherwise be. But ensuring that foreigners are not put above Brits removes one of the most egregious injustices.
There is no doubt that this policy is the ethical and pragmatic thing to do. Indeed, it should never have been allowed to begin with. There is no justification for foreigners being selected over Brits. The queue for a council house stands at 1.34 million (as of 31 March 2025) and, as the Tories have pointed out, it would take 20 years under the current rate of council housing building to provide the supply that their new policy frees up. But Kemi should also own up to the fact that the share of new social housing allocations going to foreign nationals almost doubled under the Tories.
The left of course are screeching from their Islington townhouses. The chief executive of Shelter, Sarah Elliott, has denounced the proposals as ‘divisive’. This is despite analysis from her own charity concluding that it would take approximately 119 years to clear the council housing backlog at our current construction rate.
The Royal College of Nursing has joined in, saying it would be, ‘The worst thing in the world’ to cause ‘serious housing worry’ for nurses, ‘posing serious risk to patient care’. Angela Rayner denounced the plan as the Tories ‘following Reform to the extremes’. But their response says more about their own moral bankruptcy if they would rather see Brits go homeless than get tough on restricting eligibility.
It is a stain on this country’s conscience that foreigners are housed at taxpayer expense while British veterans go homeless. It is about time parties on the right got tough on this appalling injustice.
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