Editing Openai/69640cff-e5e0-8003-a8d1-a78b118ca18b (section)

===== (B) Do serious fiscal studies omit housing-related costs? =====

Some do; some don’t; and “housing” is tricky because it mixes cash benefits, capital spending, and in-kind subsidies.
* Dustmann & Frattini explicitly allocate housing benefit spending using administrative recipient shares and also allocate housing development (social/local authority housing expenditure) using the share of social-housing tenants in LFS. That means: the claim “these studies don’t include housing at all” is false for this flagship paper.
* The newer MAC (2025) fiscal methodology explicitly includes housing-related categories (e.g., a “Housing Development” line allocated using social-housing resident data) and also discusses restrictions like settlement/ILR affecting access.

But your deeper worry is still partly valid: many fiscal exercises struggle with the implicit subsidy in social housing (the gap between social rent and market rent) and with local-service pressures that don’t show cleanly in national accounts. Even when “housing development” spend is allocated, that is not identical to valuing the in-kind rent discount or the welfare cost of longer queues / displacement.

Also, the post-2021 system matters: many people on work/student visas have No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF), which explicitly bars most benefits and “housing assistance” for immigration purposes (with exceptions).
So the “Boriswave migrants are soaking up the whole welfare cornucopia” story is mechanically constrained for large swathes of temporary migrants—though it doesn’t remove issues like private-rental pressure or local congestion.

Bottom line on (2): the strongest claim you can defend is: “Some fiscal studies may not fully capture in-kind and local-housing rationing effects.” The strongest claim you can’t defend from the good literature is: “They ignore housing / social housing entirely.”