‘Injustice!’ GB News guest fumes over council’s £1m plan to house Afghan refugees

A leading Conservative commentator has criticised North Yorkshire Council’s controversial £1million plan to house Afghan refugees, warning it creates a “sense of injustice” for local families.

Henry Hill, Deputy Editor at Conservative Home, said the scheme highlights how people “doing the right thing” and saving for deposits are seeing four-bedroom homes “being handed out to people who have functionally skipped the queue”.

He pointed to the challenges faced by young couples who have been waiting for social housing but don’t yet have children. The council’s plan involves purchasing three brand new four-bedroom houses in Selby at a total cost of nearly £977,000.

The scheme is part of the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme, which has helped over 30,000 Afghans come to the UK following the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Of the total cost, the Government will provide £444,000 in grant funding. The remaining amount will be funded through borrowing against the Housing Revenue Account, which typically manages council tenants’ rent.

The initiative aims to provide fixed housing for Afghan refugees rather than continuing to use hotels and temporary accommodation.

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Henry Hill, Deputy Editor at Conservative Home said: “Charity begins at home. Surely British families have come first. This is the politics of the housing crisis, essentially.

“You’ve got a scarce amount of stock. Lots and lots of people who can’t afford housing. Whoever the Government gives it to, it’s going to really irritate somebody.

“But in this case, it highlights the challenge for the Home Office because, on the one hand, no one likes having them in hotels. Right? It uses up town centres.

“It takes what could be a viable local business. But on the other hand, the alternative to that is either you have a purpose-built, asylum estate which we don’t have, or you permanently settle them.

“If you permanently settled them, that means that somebody else who is doing the right thing is saving up, can’t afford to put the money together for a deposit.

“Having to get from the bank of mum and dad suddenly sees a four bedroom home in their community being handed out to people who have functionally skipped the queue.

“Also the difficulty of the fact that it’s all devolved to local governments, because of course, local governments control social housing and unfortunately, most of them these days, they they’ve moved to a policy of allocating strictly by need.

“Rather than how long you’ve been waiting. So therefore, if you get somebody who turns up with a large family and they were saying just then, these are all four bedroom houses.

“Well, they need a council house more than a young couple who’ve been waiting for ages but don’t have kids yet because they can’t. They don’t have the space for them. It highlights that sense of injustice.”

In response to the concerns, North Yorkshire Council’s executive member for housing, Cllr Simon Myers, defended the scheme.

He explained that the Local Authority Housing Fund can only be used for families from the Afghan Resettlement Scheme and cannot be redirected to existing housing stock.

“The scheme is vital in supporting those who risked their lives to help British Armed Forces in Afghanistan and were forced to flee,” Myers said.