After a lifetime in Hong Kong, Sung Chi-wah and his wife packed up their belongings last June and moved to Swindon, a town of 222,000 people in southwest England – about an hour-long train ride from central London. The couple, both nearing retirement age, wanted to take care of their daughter, a first-year psychology student at the University of Bath. A few months later, they shifted to Slough in the Greater London area near Heathrow Airport, and about a 20-minute train ride from London’s Paddington Station. A friend had a flat available for rent and it was convenient to Ascot Racecourse, where the former Hong Kong Jockey Club staff and his wife now work as part-time, casual employees. The Sungs are among the 76,000 Hongkongers who relocated to the United Kingdom as of the third quarter under the British National (Overseas) visa programme introduced a year ago by Britain in response to Beijing’s controversial national security law for the city. Applications soared by 17 per cent in the last quarter alone, as emigrants fled Hong Kong’s tough quarantine controls amid a worsening Covid-19 outbreak. “Hong Kong is crazy now; I’ve never seen such a crazy moment in Hong Kong,” said Sung, referring to the city’s Omicron surge. “I want to take care of my daughter, my family, but I’m also worried about my brothers and sisters in Hong Kong and what is happening in Hong Kong.” In just over a year, the BN(O) programme has already pushed up home prices and reshaped cities and towns across the UK, handing the economy a bonanza estimated by the government at between £2.4 billion and £2.9 billion (US$3.89 billion). Due to the overwhelming demand, the UK government said it would expand the programme , letting 18 to 24-year-old Hongkongers apply independently of their parents. The programme was previously capped for Hongkongers born in the British colonial era before July 1, 1997, translating to an age limit of 25 years. Where are BN(O) emigrants settling in the UK? Anecdotal evidence shows Hongkongers preferring England to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Including the Greater London area, 94 per cent of BN (O) arrivals picked England as their preferred destination, according to a survey by Hongkongers in Britain, a support group formed in 2020 to aid new arrivals and aspiring migrants. How did London lockdowns spark super-prime home sales? London was the top choice, followed by Manchester, the survey showed. Other top picks included Birmingham in the West Midlands, Reading and Bristol in the south of England and Nottingham of the Robin Hood fame. In the most popular cities and neighbourhoods, property prices have risen as much as 11.5 per cent in the past year, according to the UK Land Registry’s data. In the West Midlands, the average house price is around £200,000, far higher in sought-after areas near Birmingham such as Sutton Coldfield or Solihull, said Tobias Sen, who works as a UK property agent after leaving Hong Kong in May. “Three-bedroom houses under £300,000 are sold at astonishing speed in these areas at the moment, very often in just two days,” he said. “The property market remains super active and sentiment remains bullish even though [there’s] a war in Ukraine.” Sen and his wife bought a three-bedroom semi-detached home in Sutton Coldfield with help from their relatives when they moved. “We chose it because of the relatively low crime rate, convenience, transport and shopping. Schools in the catchment are also good,” he said. “The environment is super nice near to Sutton Park.” Home prices in the Birmingham area increased by 7 per cent in the past year, according to the Land Registry. Rent in Birmingham’s inner city grew even faster, up 9.6 per cent in the past year, according to real estate listings website Zoopla. Charles Tang, the pastor of the Birmingham Chinese Evangelical Church, said more than 300 families joined his congregation in the past two years, most of them coming from Hong Kong. “They needed a lot of support, including [help with] housing,” such as looking for rental homes and understanding the process of buying properties, said Tang, who moved from Hong Kong in 2008. New migrant families need support in everything from learning a new language for non-English speakers, to adapting to the UK’s national health care system, he said. Some children and couples needed counselling as they struggled to adapt to new lifestyles. With a population of 1.14 million people, Birmingham is one of Britain’s largest cities, relatively convenient to travel to other major cities, Tang said. A manufacturing hub during the Industrial Revolution, it is a 162k-m drive northwest of London. The influx of Hongkongers comes as the British government takes a more critical eye to foreign money flowing into the UK’s property market from wealthy buyers in Russia, mainland China and other countries in recent years. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine , the UK government created a registry last week to unveil the identities of “beneficial owners” who owned property in Britain through shell companies. The influx of migrants exacerbates the long-running shortage of affordable housing in the UK and an ongoing cost-of-living crisis for many Britons, as inflation hit its highest level in nearly three decades in January. The UK government has the target of building 300,000 homes every year by the middle of this decade, but has yet to come close, with 216,000 supplied in 2020-2021 , the first annual decline since 2013. A 2019 study by Heriot Watt University put the required supply even higher at about 340,000 homes. About 43 per cent of that annual supply, or 145,000 homes, need to be affordable. Chris Chan Sim-kiu had hoped to buy a home after moving to Birmingham in June with her husband and three sons, but the process took much longer than expected. Neither is working right now, so they also faced challenges in renting a home. They initially lived in an Airbnb for three months after moving to the UK. “As we do not have a job or a local guarantor, there was no offer of a viewing for us,” she said. “We had to offer a prepayment of a 12-month rental fee in order to get a viewing and rent a house in Birmingham. Finally, we rented a semi-detached house for a year in Hall Green.”