The quest for a home in my homeland, continued...

June Slater

Last year I wrote here about how I was without a home, disabled and was struggling to find somewhere to live in my homeland. I’m dismayed to have to report that, a year-and-a-half later, I find myself in much the same situation.

My budget has increased following the recent death of my mother, but it’s still proving near-impossible to find a property that both fits my needs as a disabled person and that’s within my price-range. Any properties that fit the bill for me (in every sense of the term) solicit a stampede of viewers and potential buyers and I end up getting beaten to it or priced out.

A couple of weeks ago I went to view a one-bedroom detached house, on the market for a shade under £200,000. I viewed it 4 or 5 days after it had been put on the market, by which time the vendors had already had two offers and there was still viewing after viewing taking place on the day I went to see it (alas it wasn’t suitable for my needs).

I asked the estate agent who the offers had in come from: a local couple of first-time buyers, and some people from ‘up country’, which appears to be euphemistic estate-agent speak for ‘from over the border’. I really hope the vendors decide to sell it to the local couple.

I want them to have it because, in the course of my still-fruitless house-search, I’ve been struck by the fact that in rural west- and mid-Wales I come across surprisingly few Welsh people—to the extent that I’ve sometimes found myself wondering where all the Welsh people have gone!

Apart from working family farms, it seems to me that more and more rural properties in the west- and mid-Wales countryside are owned by people from England. I imagine this is true of other parts of rural Wales too.

I’ve also been able to find out that a few of the rural properties I’ve been unable to buy—too expensive at the time, or I was outbid—have since gone to people from ‘up-country’: from Sussex, the Midlands and the Isle of Wight, for example.

I recently turned up to view one house (which also turned out to be unsuitable for me) to find that the previous viewer had motorbiked all the way from Kent to view it. It was under offer soon after, so I assume it was be snapped up by the English motorcyclist.

A smallholding next to a friend—himself a recently-arrived Englishman—has just been acquired by someone from Hertfordshire, who bought it off people from Yorkshire, to add to the other people from Birmingham, Suffolk and London who’ve moved to the small valley in question.

Other properties I’ve viewed have been put on the market by vendors who previously moved here from over the border.

'Lifestyle choice'

This personal observation seems to be reflected in recent data: between 2020 and 2022, according to Compare My Move, there was an increase of 27.9% in people moving from England to Wales. Almost half (47.4%) of those who moved to Wales cited a lifestyle choice, and 26.3% did so for their retirement.

The lower cost of living was given by 15.8% as a main motivation for relocating to Wales, and it’s not hard to see how a combination of lower property prices (with a smallholding or substantial property in Wales costing the same as a very ordinary house in many parts of England, especially in the south-east) and the quality of life on offer has proved very attractive to people from over the border.

Since then, the trend has continued: last year the Telegraph reported that “Net internal migration into Wales surged by 65pc year-on-year to 17,559, also the highest total on record excluding the year to June 2020.”

While looking into this issue I forced myself to watch an episode from 2025 of the BBC’s I Escaped to the Country, a spin-off of its series Escape to the Country, which helps would-be buyers from urban areas relocate to the countryside. The one I watched focused on people who’d moved to Pembrokeshire, and indeed much was made of the lovely properties that had been unexpectedly within their budget.

One of the ‘escapees’ had moved from Warwickshire, and she was shown helping out in the village community garden and playing in the local ukulele band.

Also helping out in the garden was a woman from Wiltshire, while a man from Hampshire was a member of the band as well. It was unclear whether these people were to be taken as typical of the members of these groups or whether they’d been picked to speak because they were incomers too.

'Another county'

When the programme switched to the case of a couple who’d moved from suburban Wiltshire to a large rural property in north Pembrokeshire, they were asked how they’d experienced the move to ‘another county’, at which point I confess I shouted at the TV, ‘No, it’s actually another country!’

The influx of people from England with bigger housing budgets arguably contributes to the inflation of house prices in Wales. Indeed, a recent article in Nation.Cymru about the housing crisis in Wales noted that house prices in Wales have risen 70% in a decade while wages have lagged far behind, and around 90,000 households are on social housing waiting lists.

Shockingly, that amounts to almost 7% (6.68%) of all households in Wales. Those not currently battling to find somewhere to live might well be unaware of how difficult it is to find an affordable home in Wales.

And there’s another potential negative consequence of this influx: Dave Sayce, the owner and managing director of Compare My Move, predicts that “the more English movers that do move to Wales for the cost of living purposes, the higher the cost of living will rise in Wales, levelling out with England sometime in the near future.”

That’s not good news for Welsh people earning local wages given that house prices in Wales have experienced some of the biggest increases in the UK over the past five years.

The other piece of data that appears to back up what I’ve experienced on the ground is the fact that the latest census data (from 2021) reveals that only 1.7 million usual residents in Wales identified with a “Welsh” only identity (55.2% of the population, down from 57.5% in 2011).

Almost thirty percent (29.4%) of the population of Wales now identify as English and/or British and not Welsh at all. By contrast, some 65.5% of residents in Scotland identify only as Scottish.

Unlike in Wales, this has increased by 3.1 points since 2011, when 62.4% of people said they were Scottish, not British.

If these trends in Wales continue, it seems likely that in a couple of decades’ time those who identify only as Welsh will end up being a minority in their own country. I can’t see many other small countries thinking this is a good thing, but there’s precious little that can be done about it unless and until Wales gains independence, something that’s probably becoming less and less likely as the English population of Wales grows.

I’ve got many good friends who moved to Wales from England. They’re very happy that they did so—as am I because they’re my friends. Some incomers genuinely appreciate and embrace Welsh culture, throwing themselves into local community life and also getting to grips with the language.

It’s heartening to read about people like Anthea Fowler, who moved to Wales in 2021 and is learning Welsh. Others, however, can sometimes come across as rather indifferent to the culture of the country they’ve moved to: they like the quiet rural life but couldn’t really care less that this happens to be in Wales; the place they ended up was merely the means to a better quality of life.

There’s no personal animosity, xenophobia or anti-English sentiment in stating this. I’m not blaming those who move to Wales looking for a better life for doing so. Nor am I seeking to stoke division or fuel resentment: I’m simply reporting what I’ve noticed ‘in the field’ so to speak, and wondering what its long-term impact will be for my country.

All in all, I suspect these trends probably don’t bode well for the future of Welsh culture and identity, and even less so for the future of the Welsh language in what is already an imperiled minority culture with a domineering neighbour—one to whom Wales is constitutionally enchained and by which it’s continually exploited.

Wales is, as former Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price has put it, England’s “first and final colony”.

The Welsh Government wants Wales to have a million Welsh-speakers by 2050 but I’d wager that’s very unlikely given current trends.

Are such levels of English immigration into Wales—and into rural Wales in particular—sustainable if we want to see a viable Welsh culture, identity and language surviving into the future? I suspect not, but I’d be very glad indeed to be proved wrong.