SPARE US BRAZEN BURNHAM: Labour Made 'HMO Britain'. Reform's the One With the Bulldozer.
Labour built it, Labour runs it, and Labour won't switch it off. So Reform UK Councils like Durham did the one thing a council still can.
I have been in elected office for just over a year, and most of that year has been swallowed by three letters. H, M and O. House in Multiple Occupation. I represent part of my home town, an ex-mining town called Stanley, which, much to my mother’s delight, GB News’ Patrick Christys name-checked the other night while swatting away some leftist who reckoned Labour has left Britain in a better state than they found it. Dear reader: they have not.
Stanley is one of the most deprived places in the country, which means a ready supply of ‘affordable’ housing waiting to be snapped up by absent landlords and assorted chancers who care for nothing beyond a fast buck. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am all for people getting on. But the HMO game, as it is played around here, is not enterprise. It is treachery.
Here is how the trick works. You buy a family home, you salami-slice it into as many ‘living quarters’ as you can cram in, and you pack more bodies into less space for a fatter return. Now, County Durham has nearly 11,000 people on the social housing waiting list, with forty-four bids chasing every single home that comes up. So you might be thinking, well Grimesy, you miserable old boot, they are easing your housing shortage. No. They are helping Labour house their migrants in the private sector using taxpayer cash.
Once the preserve of the hard-up student, the HMO is now the quiet alternative to the infamous migrant hotel. Our county does not have the overnight capacity, which in this context is both a blessing and a curse. But the people who live here work every bit as hard as anyone in Islington, and find their wages buy less with every year that passes. Their children’s prospects shrink. The culture around them feels increasingly set against them. And the politicians their families trusted for generations now plainly hate them.
It is those people, my people, that I keep banging this drum for. For the likes of Siobhan Whyte, whose daughter Rhiannon was stabbed twenty-three times with a screwdriver by a man who had come here illegally on a small boat barely three months before. Twenty-three times. With a screwdriver. He is serving twenty-nine years for it, and I will not insult the language by reaching for something gentler. What is he, if not an animal? And what did the British state offer Rhiannon’s grieving mother? A quiet word about keeping things dignified, lest the truth provoke ‘another Southport’. In her own words, she was aggressive, and they toned her down.
Sit with that. In modern Britain the thing to be managed is not the murderer who came here on a dinghy. It is the grief of the family he left behind, and the reaction of the public who paid for his bed and board. Grief has become a public order problem. Honesty is a risk to be communications-managed. So forgive me if I no longer take lectures about being “alarmist” from the people who run that machine.
And while we are on the subject of lectures, a word for Andy Burnham. Fresh from his win in Makerfield, the ‘King of the North’ (what?) stood up and warned the nation about 'HMO Britain', as though he had just stumbled on the problem rather than belonged to the party that built it. Labour holds the Home Office. Labour holds the contracts. Labour's own Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, calls those contracts 'terrible' and then refuses to tear them up with the break clause sitting right there in front of her. And Burnham's big idea? Move people out of the hotels and into dispersal housing. Shared houses. HMOs by another name, parked in towns like mine. So spare us, Andy. You named the disease your own government is spreading, while the only people reaching for the cure are Reform councils like Durham.
The ‘Pause’ That Never Was
Because for the entire year I have been in office, I have asked the Home Office and the North East Migration Partnership two very simple questions. How many are here, and where. And for a year I have been met with the bureaucrat’s favourite answer: it’s all online. It is not all online. The numbers that matter are never online. When we formally request the data, so we can establish whether anyone else in the country is pulling their weight, we get silence, or we get told to go and read the Migration Observatory website ourselves. That is the contempt with which this government treats the North East.
Earlier this year I had to fight off the restarting of property procurement in County Durham the only way that ever seems to work, by leaking it to the press and plastering it across social media. The Labour MPs kicked up a fuss after residents rightly , the Home Office hastily reinstated the pause, and I was duly accused, again, of being deceitful, scaremongering, making it all up.
Which brings me to a document that has found its way to my desk.
This is not some shadowy leak. It is the "Friday Focus," the internal weekly round-up for the AASC, the Home Office's Asylum Accommodation and Support Contract, the multi-billion-pound deal that hands the housing of so-called asylum seekers to private firms region by region. In the North East, the firm holding that contract is Mears. And this is plainly Mears talking to its own people: it briefs them on staff being transferred into Mears and on expansion across Mears' own patch. What it also sets out, signed off at director level, is a plan to acquire another nine hundred properties across the North East, Yorkshire and Humber, as part of Home Office plans to increase what they like to call "dispersed accommodation”.
Nine hundred. Across our region. Written down by the very company that has spent a year being defended by North East MPs who told this county, and told me, that I was being dishonest and that the North East was not in the frame.
Well. Here it is. Their words, not mine.
Where Do They Go When They’re Refused?
Then there is the other end of the conveyor belt, the part nobody in Whitehall wants to discuss. I have seen a Mears letter sent to a man housed in one of these HMOs here in our patch. His asylum claim has failed. Every appeal exhausted. And the letter does precisely what these letters always do. It informs him his support is ending, that he is now “expected to make arrangements to leave the United Kingdom without delay,” and that he must be out of the property by a fixed date that has already come and gone.
And then? Nothing. No Border Force at the door. No knock. No escort to the airport. A failed asylum seeker is told to leave the country by letter, on the honour system, and we’re all expected to cross our fingers and hope for the best.
You can guess how that ends, because we have the figures and they are damning. In the overwhelming majority of these cases the man does not pack a bag and present himself at Heathrow for a flight home. He absconds. Off the books, out of the system, into the underground economy, usually to Manchester, Birmingham or London, where the cash-in-hand work is and the questions are fewer. We brought him here, we housed him at public expense in a deprived ex-mining town, and then we let go of the string on purpose. We no longer know his name, his whereabouts, or his intentions. He is simply gone.
And when local residents raise the alarm about what is actually happening inside these properties, that same instinct kicks in. I have asked the police about specific incidents that people flagged, only to be told it was nothing, overblown, not really a problem at all. Then I have seen Mears’ own inspection records telling a very different story, relevant items found, the problem that supposedly never existed sitting there in black and white. The default is always the same. Calm down. Tone it down. You imagined it.
We Are Being Gaslit
This is why people feel utterly powerless. Not because they are bigots, whatever the oat-milk-flat-white set tell themselves, but because they can see exactly what is being done to their town and they are told, every single time, that they made it up. They watch the HMO next door fill up. They watch the waiting list for a council house climb towards eleven thousand while homes change hands all around them. They watch their wages buy less and their children’s horizons shrink, and they watch a Home Office contractor quietly shopping for another nine hundred front doors to put behind them. And when they say so, out loud, in plain English, the state’s first reflex is to manage their mood.
So What The Hell Are You Doing About It?!
So let me tell you what we are doing about it, because grievance without a fight is just whining, and I do not whine. From Monday the seventeenth of August, the whole of County Durham comes under an Article 4 Direction. In plain English, the loophole shuts. As things stand, anyone can take a family home and carve it into a small HMO for half a dozen people without so much as a by-your-leave. No planning permission. No application. No say for the neighbours. Worse, the council often does not even know the place exists until it is already up and running and full. We find out after the fact, every single time, which is no way to run a county.
From that date, every new HMO in Durham needs planning permission. All of them, whatever the size. We will be able to look at each one, weigh it against the street it sits on, and say no where saying no is right. We put it to the public and more than fourteen hundred people replied, around eighty per cent of them in favour. So spare me the line that locals secretly love what is being done to their towns as a spoonful of multiculturalism ideology is force-fed to them. They do not. They told us so in black and white.
And yes, some will squeal. The absent landlords who have spent the last few years quietly flogging Stanley as a cheap HMO ‘opportunity’, the buy-to-let brigade who looked at a deprived ex-mining town and saw nothing but yield, they do not care to be told no. Good. Let them. Their portfolios were never worth more than the family homes they have been carving up, and if the price of protecting our streets is a few speculators losing a little froth off the top, I will pay it gladly and twice on a Sunday.
I will not pretend it is a magic wand. It will not un-slice the homes already gone, and it will not by itself empty a single Home Office contract. But it drags the whole grubby business into the daylight, where the council, the residents and the press can finally see it coming. And daylight, as this government keeps reminding us by running from it, is the one thing these people fear most.
I will not have my mood managed. Not by a Labour MP, not by the North East Migration Partnership, not by a contractor’s press office, and not by a police force more frightened of a Facebook post than of a man it has lost track of entirely.
This is real news from the no-nonsense north. The numbers are real. The letter is real. The nine hundred is real. And the powerlessness that people out here feel is the most real thing of all. The very least we owe them is to stop pretending none of it is happening.