The Conservatives have proposed barring foreign nationals from social housing in England, a policy critics say echoes Nigel Farage's Reform Party and has been branded "unserious and unworkable". Kemi Badenoch's party claims the plan would free up around 230,000 homes, but housing lawyers and Labour have warned it risks breaching human rights law and could primarily harm refugees and long-term UK residents, including NHS workers, rather than delivering the promised benefits.

Under the proposal, single social housing tenants who are not UK, Irish or EU citizens would lose their homes regardless of whether they have children, and would be expected to move out within six months; new tenancies would be restricted to UK nationals and those with EU settled status. Government figures show 90 per cent of social lets already go to UK nationals, while Oxford University's Migration Observatory found 15 per cent of social housing residents were born abroad, slightly below the wider foreign-born population share. A housing law specialist warned that retrospectively evicting existing lawful tenants, including refugees, would likely breach the European Convention on Human Rights and UK equality law, calling it more a political statement than a workable policy, while Labour said the plan ignores the housing crisis and would increase costly temporary accommodation use.