On Monday 24 August, Reform UK’s deputy leader — Richard Tice — appeared in an interview on Times Radio. He set out his far-right party’s plans to prioritise married, British-born, working couples under the age of 35 for affordable housing.
Tice gave the interview ahead of a press conference in which he’ll set out the policy in more detail. However, even from the Sparknotes version he gave on air, this sounds like a fascist-friendly car crash. Take a listen, if you can stomach it:
British married couples would get priority for social housing, says Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, but he was unclear where same-sex married couples would be on that list.
“As long as we’re building plenty of homes, then there will be sufficient room for them.”@CalumAM pic.twitter.com/ePkijvq13K
— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) August 24, 2026
‘The housing system is broken’ (says the landlord)
Tice begins with a boast:
My lifetime has been spent building homes, in property. I’ve actually build more homes than the previous 24 housing ministers this century combined. So, we’re gonna get stuff done, we’re gonna build homes, and the simple fact is the housing system is broken, the affordable housing system is broken, and Reform will fix it.
Of course, it’s much easier to build homes when you’ve no need to make them affordable. And then, you can really save money by (allegedly) dodging hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax.
According to the Times, Tice channeled shareholder dividends through dormant businesses and an offshore trust between 2018 and 2021, avoiding a possible £600,000 in taxes. The Reform deputy, true to his party line, called this an ‘establishment smear’
And don’t even get us started on Reform’s inability to budget a County Council, never mind a sweeping affordable housing program. However, the party (like Tice, allegedly) have a habit of forgetting they have to pay their taxes. That probably helps smooth the cracks in the balance book a little.
Reforms says ‘having British children…is a good thing’
When asked whether a married couple would get priority over a single person, Tice answered that:
Yes, that is the preference. Well, families are a good thing. Having British children, British-born children is a good thing. We need to encourage that. And it’s a very natural, normal thing, has been over centuries, for people to get together, to get married, have children and contribute to their communities. And everything that we’re doing is focused solely on that.
Lots of British families making lots of British babies. No fascist undertones to that at all, no sir.
It’s funny how often things that are “very natural” and “normal” need to be encouraged by government policy. One would think that, if people have to be threatened with having no home in order to get married and have babies, then getting married and having babies might not actually be all that natural.
‘In an ideal world’ you’d be married
Tice’s interviewer then reminded him that a single person might also have children. The Reform deputy replied:
They might. But in an ideal world, it is well known that married couples – children in married couples, for example – will do really well at school. And we want to encourage that.
Of course, sometimes life doesn’t work out. We understand that. But as an objective, that is surely preferable.
Just so it’s said: marriage is a legal contract. It’s not a bloody magic spell, it doesn’t suddenly make people into better parents. Not getting married isn’t a sign that ‘life doesn’t work out’ – not that we’d expect Reform to encourage people making their own choices.
The children of married couples do well in large part because their families have two incomes to support them. Rent profiteers like Tice and his ilk have ensured that dual-incomes are one of the few ways to keep a stable roof over your head — and even that’s getting dicey.
And, of course, if Reform was actually interested in using social engineering to create families with higher-attaining children, they’d be trying to encourage people to create gay families. After all, multiple recent studies suggest that kids raised by ‘same-sex’ couples do better in schools.
Except that Reform isn’t actually interested in educational attainment — it’s interested in conformity. Plus, the party still has a homophobia problem — with leader Farage stating that legalising gay marriage was “wrong” as recently as last year.
Sure, sure, he was arguing that it should have been a manifesto commitment, blah blah. ‘I support the gays, but not their reckless disregard for political due-process’ – I bet, buddy.
‘There’ll be an allocation list’
Speaking of which, the Times Radio interviewer asked Tice where a married same-sex couple would fit on his your priority list. As you’d expect, the answer was… well, it was a bit weird, really. Tice replied:
Well there’ll be an allocation list. But at the end of the day, what we’re focused on is young British workers first. Same-sex couples, British couples, working – they will have priority over those coming from overseas.
‘There’ll be an allocation list’ – not even an elegant swerve of a simple question there, deputy party leader. Reform really are losing their touch.
Even the softball interviewer couldn’t help but pick Tice up on the fact that married British couples would also have priority over other British couples who weren’t married under Reform’s new plans. Here, Tice really lost his thread:
There will be, within the British community of young workers, ah, as long as we’re building plenty of homes, there will be sufficient room for them, because if you add up the half-a-million-plus homes currently occupied by overseas people, overseas nationals, and the 500,000 we’re going to build over the next decade, that’s a million homes for young British workers.
That’s the right thing to do, it’s the fair thing to do. Reform are going to fix this broken system.
As a reminder, Labour pledged to build 1.5m new homes over the course of parliament. Sure, they’re currently running behind, but then, that’s new homes we’re talking about — not the half a million Tice is apparently planning on nicking from immigrants… again, no fascist undertones there in the slightest.
Join us tomorrow for some analysis of Reform’s actual housing policy, rather than Tice’s hopefully piss-poor explanation of it. But for now, as a rough guideline: if it’s the right thing to do, and the fair thing to do, you won’t catch Reform UK proposing it on the radio.
Featured image via the Canary
By Grace
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