With the official negotiations for the UK exiting the European Union starting this week, those hoping to see more houses suddenly become available due to less migration could be disappointed.

Writing on the Council of Mortgage Lenders’ website, John Perry, production editor of the newly published 2017 UK Housing from the Chartered Institute of Housing, looked at claims made in some newspapers that if we are leaving the EU, there will be fewer migrants, and so we can build fewer new houses.

Perry said: “Demand for housing depends mainly on household growth. The latest projections for England were made before last June’s referendum.

“They suggested that we need to build 227,000 homes a year up to 2024, with a lower target after that. Of the total, 37% – or 84,000 a year – results from migration.

“The projections assume that net migration falls to only 170,500 a year from 2020/21, but recent levels have been much higher. EU net migration alone totalled 165,000 in the past year, with net migration of 164,000 from outside the EU. Will EU migration really disappear by 2021 to make these projections a reality?”

He points out that the Government has already said it would allow continuing access for professional workers and also looks at how likely a big reduction in EU migration would be.

He adds: “There is also likely to be some sort of programme for seasonal farm workers. However, in the middle, there is a broad range of skilled and semi-skilled jobs that still have to be filled – not least the 9% of building workers from the EU, for example.

“There could be a work permit scheme but, for sectors depending on people moving between jobs, it will be very difficult to put in place. Just think about care workers – 92,000 are from the EU, but there are already something like 70,000 job vacancies in the sector. So, there are difficult decisions about the numbers needed in each sector, how to admit them and under what conditions.”

Ultimately, he says, the demand for workers in farming or food processing will still be there post-Brexit, and if labour does not come from Europe, either it will come from somewhere else or food production will move abroad.

He concludes that most of the changes in housing will actually be felt in the rental sector, adding: “Of the 9.8m private tenants in the UK in 2011, some 3.8m did not hold UK passports and almost one-third of these were from the EU. So, there might be a big effect on smaller local housing markets in places where the proportion of migrants has grown fastest.”