Durham is Not a Dumping Ground: Fixing the Great Housing Betrayal

The assault on working class communities treats us like a skip for the problems of southern politicians

If you want to see the utter bankruptcy of the Lefty consensus, look no further than our former pit villages.

For decades, the political establishment has pursued an open-borders dogma and disastrous housing policies, creating a crisis they have absolutely no intention of living alongside.

Their solution? Export it to the North.

Right now, London boroughs are quietly shifting their problem tenants, recent refugees, and homeless families hundreds of miles north to County Durham. They block-book cheap terraced houses, hand people a train ticket, and wash their hands of the consequences.

London has entirely lost the plot. Thanks to their disastrous policies and a 41% drop in rental properties since before the pandemic, their boroughs are now blowing a staggering £5.5 million every single day on temporary accommodation.

A quarter of the 360,000 homeless applications made across England last year were in the capital. Instead of fixing their own mess, they are boxing up their problem and shipping it north.

We’ve had official notifications of nearly 100 households moved from London into County Durham in the last two years alone. And let’s be honest, those are just the ones they actually bothered to declare. It is a stupid, scandalous dereliction of duty.

My colleague, Cllr Nicola Lyons, has been entirely right to call this a total scandal. These southern councils are dumping people here without even having the basic courtesy to pick up the phone and tell the local authority they’re coming.

They drop them into struggling communities where the schools are already full, the GP appointments are non-existent, and integration is zero. It is fundamentally stupid and antidemocratic in nature.

We currently have 10,000 people languishing on our social housing waiting list. I am contacted about this most weeks. We have just 3,000 homes available a year. You don’t need a degree in advanced mathematics to see that the system is rigged against local people. Even Diane Abacus could figure this one out.

The performative woke brigade in London thinks prioritising your own community is a thought crime. They are perfectly content to hand out the keys to anyone who fancies rolling up, whilst local working people who have paid into the system their entire lives get shoved to the back of the queue.

I despise this mentality. If you haven’t put into our community, do not expect our community to bail you out.

Reform is in charge now. We are bringing common sense back to County Durham.

We have just published our new draft policy for social housing allocation. From now on, if you want to join the housing register, you must have lived in County Durham for a minimum of two years. A local connection for local homes.

We are also unapologetically fast-tracking our veterans. The idea that men and women who put their lives on the line for this nation should be left sleeping on its streets is a national disgrace. The sight of former military bases being kitted out for those who have arrived illegally quite rightly sticks in the craw of many of us. If you have served in our armed forces, you get the priority you have earned.

We aren’t heartless, we are just realistic. We are ensuring preference goes to those who genuinely need it: people fleeing domestic abuse, those with urgent medical needs, and families crammed into severely overcrowded homes. Sensible exemptions exist for care leavers and those who work or care here. We wonder why we have a declining birth rate and then shrug our shoulders as homes are snapped up by anybody but locals.

But the days of County Durham being shafted by southern councils and a broken system are over. We will defend working people, common sense, and the nation without apology.