Nigel Farage hailed for 'common sense' plan to crack down on foreign nationals living in social housing: 'Long overdue!'

In the Substack essay published today, the Reform UK leader confirmed that a Reform Government would evict foreign nationals from council housing.

Migrants would have three months to find private accommodation or face being removed from the country.

Priority for housing would then be given to veterans, domestic abuse survivors, care leavers and what Reform describes as "long term local residents".

Throwing her support behind the policy, Ms Kemkaran denied host Dawn Neesom's claim that the policy is "shocking".

She told GB News: "Is it shocking? I must admit, I read Nigel's new Substack and I just thought, hooray! At last, a political leader is talking common sense.

"A political leader has understood the pressures that we're facing in this country with our basic services that we all pay into through our taxes."

Ms Kemkaran argued that had the previous Conservative Government put forward such a policy, they would "still be in power" today.

She said: "Social housing is being given away in such large numbers to people who, for the most part, are probably not British passport holders or are not UK citizens. Why on earth are they being given access to our precious social housing stock?

"So I don't see it as shocking as at all, I see it as long overdue, and this is the kind of policy that if the Conservatives that had the backbone and understood the mood of the nation when they were still in power and had implemented something like this, they would still be in power."

The Reform councillor admitted that the party must make "really tough choices" if they are to properly crack down on the UK's housing crisis.

She told GB News: "We have to make some really tough choices now, because the level of immigration into this country over the last 20 odd years has gone above and beyond the levels which we can cope with.

"We've seen an influx of people, some legally, a lot illegally, they've been allowed to come here, they've not been able to get jobs to support themselves in terms of being able to rent privately or buy housing, and they've been given access to our social housing stocks."

She added: "Now, we didn't have enough social housing anyway, even before Labour opened the floodgates to this wave of immigration.

"The stocks have always been low, and the thing is, successive governments have not reinvested enough money into building new stocks of what we used to call council houses and of course, social housing.

"So those resources are precious. If they are being used by people who have come into the country, then it means the indigenous population simply doesn't stand a chance. That is fundamentally unfair. So I think Nigel's proposals are absolutely spot on and long overdue."

Asked whether Reform would implement an "American-style Ice strategy" to "forcibly remove people from their homes", Ms Kemkaran was unsure.

She explained: "I don't know about that, but Nigel and Zia previously held a big press conference called Operation Restoring Justice, where they set out the steps they were going to take as a party to try and restore the balance.

"We have got to wean ourselves off the allure of cheap foreign labour. We've become addicted to the drug of being able to import people, often from very poor countries overseas, to come here and do the jobs that British people don't want to do now. That's got us into all kinds of a pickle."