Record migration since 2020 has pushed house prices up by around £15,270, analysis has found.
Housebuilding has failed to keep pace with the growth in population, 99 per cent of which is accounted for by net migration, according to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).
If net migration had been kept below 100,000, average house prices would be 5.2 per cent lower at £275,650 rather than £290,920, the figures show.
Britain sits near the bottom of the European league table for fewest homes per capita. Only Ireland has fewer per 1,000 people than the UK.
Last year, Britain had 444.9 homes per 1,000 people, but the CPS said it would have been 473 per 1,000 people if net migration had been capped at 100,000 a year since 1997.
Ben Hopkinson, the CPS’s head of housing, said: “The surge in migration since 2020 hasn’t just added to the demand for housing – it has added more than £15,000 to the price of the average English home.
“That is money straight out of the pockets of first-time buyers and renters, and it helps explain why house prices have stayed so stubbornly high even as interest rates rose.
“But migration is only half the picture. We have under-built for decades, and even with no migration at all we would still be millions of homes short.
“The good news is that this is fixable. Had we matched France’s building rate since the 1980s and kept migration to sustainable levels, the housing crisis would essentially be over. The best time to act was decades ago. The second-best time is now.”
