The housing crisis tearing Leicester apart Slum conditions are fuelling ethnic tensions

The South Asian neighbourhood of Highfields in Leicester is made up of long, sloping streets of terraced houses, built largely between the Victorian era and the Second World War. At that time, Leicester was a major centre of Britain’s booming textile trade, becoming Europe’s second richest city in 1936. Today, though many Highfields residents still work in garment factories, these are more associated with exploitative practices than prosperity. While parts of the neighbourhood are still bustling, others have a ragged and timeworn character. The issues facing Highfields — particularly immigration, housing shortages and a crisis of government funding — are once again indicative of wider trends shaping British life.

The first of these factors, immigration, has brought Leicester into the national spotlight in recent years. Since the Fifties, when small numbers arrived from the Commonwealth, the city has increasingly become known as a place of different cultures and faiths. Some 20,000 South Asians came during the Seventies, not from India but East Africa, where they had settled under the British Empire. Leicester is also home to Somali, Polish and Romanian minorities. But in 2022, the city’s vaunted harmony was ruptured by clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Highfields and the neighbouring Belgrave area. In a foreshadowing of the recent riots that followed the Southport stabbings, authorities in Leicester blamed the unrest on false claims spreading via social media, including rumours of attacks on places of worship and the attempted kidnapping of a Muslim girl. The mayor Peter Soulsby spoke of a campaign to recruit troublemakers from outside the city. But other accounts of the disturbances — including one I heard from a long-standing Gujarati resident in the city — have drawn attention to the recent arrival, via Portugal, of more assertive Hindus from the Indian regions of Daman and Diu.

The spectre of sectarian politics returned at last month’s general election. In Leicester South, the constituency where Highfields is located, former Labour frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth saw his 22,000 majority overturned by an independent, the optometrist Shockat Adam, who channelled the anger of local Muslims over the war in Gaza. Ashworth complained that “I’ve never known a campaign of such vitriol, such bullying, such intimidation,” saying he was barred from mosques and chased down streets. Meanwhile, the only Conservative gain of the entire election came in Leicester East, apparently confirming the drift of the city’s Hindus towards the Tories.

These ructions may help to explain the suspicion I encountered in Leicester, from both council employees and members of the public. Many people did not want to speak to me or be seen speaking to me. Then again, I saw no signs of religious tension, with the exception of one angry diatribe about immigrants, and that came from an elderly Sikh man who had moved here in the Sixties. Leicester has also remained relatively peaceful during the widespread anti-immigration protests and riots of the past fortnight. Most of my conversations pointed to a different, more material problem raised by immigration: the difficulty of finding housing in a city that is growing rapidly, even as its authorities struggle with overstretched resources.

Recent demographic data for Leicester presents a picture of remarkable change. The city’s population was estimated at about 380,000 last year, a rise of 15% since 2011. The increase in its foreign-born residents has been greater than its overall population growth, suggesting that the latter has mainly been driven by international migration. In a single year to July 2023, the equivalent of 3.6% of the city’s population arrived from overseas. But Leicester has only added 25,000 new houses since 2001, despite gaining four times as many new residents. It is now one of the most densely populated local authorities outside London, a density that its ageing, low-rise housing stock is not well placed to handle.

One result of this is fierce competition in the rental market. Leicester’s prices are rising even faster than London’s. An estate agent in Highfields told me she had received 10 calls in a matter of hours for a two-bed house at £900 per month, which is above the city average. She also said she did not struggle to find housing for newly arrived immigrants, since they tended to have good jobs — often in the NHS — and to be hard-working, wanting to “make a better life”. It is more difficult, of course, for those in the gig economy. The father of one family I met, who is an Uber driver, told me they had been looking for a one-bed flat in Leicester for six months, having originally moved to London from India in 2022.

Other losers in the housing market are those working for low wages, such as east Leicester’s textile workers. Their situation has become even worse since the local clothing industry was decimated by the Covid pandemic and soaring energy costs. Similar issues exist in white working-class areas in the west of the city. A 21-year-old street cleaner said he was still living with his dad and had no intention of moving. When I asked if this would make it difficult to start a family, he told me he already had a partner and two children there with him. Apparently most of his friends have similar arrangements.

All this has contributed to a surge of claims on the local authority. In 2022, Leicester City Council officially declared a crisis due to the numbers on its waiting lists for social housing, reported to be 6,400 households late last year. Half of those applicants qualify due to overcrowding in their existing homes; I heard of two-bed properties housing as many as 15 people. Yet the council’s ability to provide housing has been steadily undermined by a high uptake of Right to Buy, the Thatcherite policy which allows social tenants to purchase their homes at a discounted rate. It lost nearly 2,000 properties in this way in the five years up to 2022.

Recent years have also seen a dramatic rise in homelessness. Faced with the costs of housing hundreds of homeless families in bed and breakfasts and other temporary accommodation, the council this year borrowed £45 million to buy and rent more properties. It also cited the costs of 1,000 asylum decisions expected this year, and has taken out further loans to accommodate those arriving through humanitarian schemes.

The need for more housing in Leicester is evident; the question is where, and how quickly, it can be built. In theory, the obvious solution is to increase the density of terraced streets like those in Highfields, by building upwards. Yet even with Labour’s much-hyped planning reforms, a city like Leicester has neither the financial capacity nor the policy tools for such a challenge. Instead, it is currently committed to adding around 1,300 new houses annually, a target that is basically unchanged since 2006. The council cites lack of land as a constraint, though there are signs of the inefficiencies that have plagued house-building in Britain more generally. A large development in the north of the city, Ashton Green, received planning permission for 3,000 houses in 2011 (the site had been earmarked since the Seventies), but so far just 208 have been completed.

Housing shortages place heavy strains on the social fabric, and as such, they cannot be neatly separated from Leicester’s recent political convulsions. Few forms of deprivation are as liable to fuel resentment and undermine trust as the lack of a secure home.  Writing in The Guardian, Yohann Koshy suggests that a sense of dwindling resources has given life in the city “an edge of desperation”, as “communities compete for what remains”. In his victory speech, the new Leicester South MP Shockat Adam declared “this is for the people of Gaza”, but he has since claimed that “when I spoke at events or on my campaign trail, housing was the number-one issue”. Progressives rightly emphasise the impact of austerity on local authorities since 2010, which has left places like Leicester unable to handle issues such as unemployment, overcrowding and homelessness. The on-going consequences of Liz Truss’ disastrous financial experiment have made these significantly worse. But the charge sheet against Westminster must also include immigration policy.

Whatever one thinks of mass immigration in cultural or economic terms, the fact is that successive governments have rapidly increased the country’s population with no realistic plan for housing it with dignity. These were deeply irresponsible decisions, contributing to the return of slum conditions in many parts of Britain. The recent outbreaks of violence against migrants will only make politicians more reluctant to acknowledge the link between immigration and housing shortages; and yet, while this certainly leaves an open goal for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, it is foolish to imagine that only those who consider themselves native Brits will feel aggrieved. In British cities, it is often immigrants and the children of immigrants who must bear the instability of large, chaotic population flows, denying them the opportunity to put down roots. Leicester is a clear example of this, as the struggle for affordable housing afflicts a population that is well over 40% foreign-born.

However, Leicester’s recent experience also points to changes unfolding beyond urban Britain. When the city’s council said it was unable to meet new housing targets in 2020, an agreement was reached for an “overspill” of 18,700 houses be built in surrounding parts of Leicestershire instead. For some local authorities, such as Blaby and North West Leicestershire, this means doubling their existing housebuilding quotas up to 2036. This has not been without controversy. Local news is full of scare stories about housing developments swamping small villages and golf courses, while several Conservative MPs with constituencies bordering Leicester have protested the overspill scheme. Neil O’Brien, who represents Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, demanded that the city “meet its own housing needs locally, rather than dump it onto surrounding districts”.

Such tensions between city, suburb, town and countryside were bound to be a result of Britain’s housing shortfall. They have now reappeared at a national level, as Labour’s newly announced formulas shift housebuilding quotas from inner cities to less built-up (and less reliably Labour-voting) areas. These plans will doubtless meet with plenty of local friction, but the overall trajectory is already clear. Visit an affluent, medium-sized British town with decent transport links — a town such as Market Harborough, in O’Brien’s constituency, which is 15 minutes from Leicester and an hour from London — and the chances are that you will see redbrick new-builds going up around its outskirts. Given their available and affordable land, these places will inevitably be the focus of development over the next decades.

And they will become more of a destination for migration as well. Since their residents skew older and wealthier, there is demand for the kinds of service jobs and social care positions that many new arrivals occupy. At the same time, they will continue attracting middle-class Brits from immigrant backgrounds, who are doing as the middle classes always do and moving outwards from the suburbs. Since the post-war era, the story of migration to Britain has been dominated by urban, often relatively deprived areas like Highfields; the next chapter will also be set in leafy satellite towns.

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