We Win The Power To Stop Migrant HMOs On 17 August. On 31 October, Labour Take It Off Us.

Durham's Article 4 Direction lands next month. Ten weeks later a national law strips councillors of the right to call any of it before a committee. Will Labour stop at nothing to protect migrant homes

I sat down with Alex Phillips this week and, I’ll be honest with you, neither of us needed much warming up.

The peg was a single morning’s work on the French coast. Around a thousand illegal migrants launched for Britain while the French police stood on the sand and, as near as I can tell, waved them off. Bon voyage, lads. Mind the wake.

We have sent France the best part of a billion pounds of British taxpayers’ money to stop precisely this. What we bought, on the evidence of that morning, was a group of well-paid men in uniform giving quotes to journalists about how they have orders not to intervene. Orders. Not confusion, not a lack of kit, not a shortage of boats. Orders.

So there they were, watching dinghies leave in daylight like spectators at a village fete, and the only thing anybody intercepted that morning was a French policeman’s lunch break.

Say her name

That morning did not land in a vacuum. It landed on top of a story the day before of a Sudanese man attempting to commit atrocities at a primary school.

Remember Rhiannon Skye Whyte? She was 27 years old. She had a little boy. She worked at the Park Inn in Walsall, one of the hotels the Home Office was using to house asylum seekers, and her job was serving food and cleaning up after the men living in it.

One of those men was Deng Chol Majek. He had come across the Channel in a small boat less than three months earlier. Staff had already reported him to hotel security for the way he watched the women working there.

On the night of 20 October 2024, Rhiannon finished her shift at eleven o’clock and walked to Bescot Stadium station to get her train home. He followed her. On an empty platform he attacked her with a screwdriver and stabbed her 23 times, 19 of those wounds to her head. She was found bleeding in the platform shelter by the crew of the next train. She died in hospital three days later.

He went and bought a beer. He was filmed wiping the blood off his trousers. He went back to the hotel, changed his shoes, and was seen dancing in the car park in sight of the ambulances still working to save her.

He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life with a minimum of 29 years. He claimed to be 19. The court found he was 26. He has never admitted a thing.

The judge made the point that ought to be carved into the front of the Home Office. Rhiannon and her colleagues had been serving and helping this man, and he murdered her for no reason anyone has ever been able to establish.

And this week a man from the same part of the world arrested with knives near a primary school. I put them side by side for one reason. The same profile of arrival, from the same handful of countries, keeps producing the same category of horror, and every institution in this country would rather interrogate the person pointing it out than the pattern itself.

Rhiannon Whyte was not killed by an abstraction. She was killed by a man the British state brought here, housed here, failed to identify properly, failed to remove, and then placed in a building where she was expected to bring him his dinner.

Say her name. Her family have had to fight to keep it in the conversation while the rest of the machine changes the subject to tone.

“People just don’t understand our plan”

Here is the line that finished me off. Confronted with the footage, the government’s answer was that the public simply doesn’t grasp the plan.

We grasp it perfectly. That is the entire problem.

Andy Burnham can stand there and tell you the strategy is working for as long as his voice holds out. There is a queue outside the job centre in Labour Britain that is working harder than he is. Nobody standing on that beach believes a word of it. More to the point, neither do the gangs. They have already priced in a Burnham premiership and adjusted their advertising accordingly.

That is not border enforcement. It is a day out at the seaside.

And he will do the routine, won’t he. The T-shirt. The chat about his dad. The eyelash flutter and the studied air of a normal bloke who just happens to have spent his entire adult life in the Westminster machine. I can spot that gaslighting from the other end of the A1, because it is now a daily occurrence.

When he talks about devolution, about power being pushed as close to the individual as it can possibly go, he should come to County Durham and say it to my residents’ faces. Because on the one issue they care most about, they have precisely no power at all. Nor, frankly, do I. You snake oil salesman.

Now the bit that should genuinely alarm you

Alex asked me a simple question. How many migrant HMOs are there in Durham?

I am the Deputy Leader of the council. I sit in Cabinet. I hold the finance portfolio. And I cannot tell you.

Not because I haven’t asked. Because the Home Office won’t say. They tell us the information is protected and cannot be released. A government department is using our housing stock in our county to accommodate people who have no legal right to be here, and the elected authority responsible for those streets is locked out of the numbers.

Read that again and tell me we live in a functioning democracy.

The mechanism is beautifully simple. These are private properties. Mears, the Home Office contractor, buys or leases a house on an ordinary street, does it up, puts six men in it, and until this month needed no planning permission whatsoever to do so. No notification. No consultation. No knock on the neighbour’s door. Nothing.

The first a family knows about it is the van on the driveway.

The phone calls

I get residents ringing me in floods of tears. Not cross. Not politically motivated. Terrified, and crying down the phone, about who is going to be living on the other side of their wall by the end of the month.

They ask reasonable questions and nobody in authority will answer a single one of them.

Who are these men? We don’t know. Where have they come from? We don’t know. What are their intentions? We don’t know. Where exactly are they being placed? We are not permitted to know.

Is there a nursery next door. Is there a girls’ school at the top of the road. If I exchange contracts on Friday, will there be five of these houses on my street by Christmas and what happens to the only asset I will ever own.

Not one of those is a bigoted question. Every single one of them is the question any sane person asks about the street they are raising children on. And the answer they get from the British state is a shrug and a data protection excuse.

I have felt utterly powerless for the past year. I am not going to dress that up for you, because the powerlessness is the story. It is what people feel about immigration and it is what they feel about housing, and the two have now fused into the same wound.

Eleven thousand on the list

Here is the number I can give you, because it is ours.

We have around 11,000 people on the Durham housing waiting list. Roughly 3,000 properties are available to meet that need. You do not need a spreadsheet to see the shape of that problem.

And at the same time, the same government that cannot house them is out in the market, through a contractor, using their money to acquire private homes in their county to accommodate men who arrived here illegally.

So a woman rings me. She is trying to get herself and her kids out of a violent house. She has been waiting months. She wants to know how it is fair, proportionate or defensible that someone who broke into the country gets a front door before she does.

I have no good answer for her. There isn’t one. There is only the truth, which is that she has been sorted into the wrong postcode.

Because this is a lottery, and it is a lottery rigged by deprivation. These properties do not appear in the leafy commuter belt where the people writing the policy live. They appear in Stanley, in Consett, Crook and Kelloe, in the old pit villages, in the streets where housing is cheap and the residents are assumed to have no lawyers and no voice. If your postcode looks like ours, you are not winning this lottery any time soon.

And I would suggest that is exactly why the Home Office does not want the map published.

Now here is the part nobody has told you

Everything above is the situation today. Hold onto it, because it is about to get considerably worse, and it will happen with a press release calling it reform.

Burnham is committed to tearing up the asylum accommodation contracts with the three private providers. He has been briefing about it for months. Break clauses came available in March. On the face of it, marvellous. Those contracts have been a licence to print money and I will not shed a tear for the shareholders.

Then you read the second half of the plan.

The people currently in the hotels do not vanish when the hotels close. Under Burnham’s scheme they go into dispersal housing. Bedsits. Shared houses. Ordinary terraces on ordinary streets. And responsibility for finding that accommodation passes to local councils.

Sit with that a moment.

Every hotel that closes to a fanfare about ending the scandal of asylum hotels converts into a dozen more houses in multiple occupation, and they do not appear in Islington. They appear in Stanley. In Dipton. In Consett. In Ferryhill. They appear wherever the housing is cheapest, which is to say wherever people have the least ability to stop it.

The hotels were at least visible. You could see one. You could photograph one. You could stand outside one with a placard and a camera crew. Dispersal into six-bed HMOs on residential streets is the same policy with the evidence spread thinner. It is not an end to asylum accommodation. It is asylum accommodation with the lights turned off. If they must stay here, they ought to be penned into a secure facility!

And they will show you a number to prove it is working. Hotel occupancy down thirty-five per cent in a year, down sixty-three per cent from the peak. True, as far as it goes. It just doesn’t tell you where those people went. It tells you they stopped being counted somewhere you could see them.

We asked him. In writing. With twenty-four signatures.

Nobody can accuse us of not going through the proper channels.

Zia Yusuf wrote to the Prime Minister demanding he devolve control over asylum accommodation decisions to local authorities before the end of this parliamentary session. Twenty-four council leaders signed it. Durham among them, along with Derbyshire, East Sussex, Sunderland, Leicestershire, Calderdale and Walsall.

Walsall. Think about that signature for a second, and about the young woman who worked at the Park Inn.

The letter did nothing more than quote Burnham back at himself. He is the man who built a career on the argument that centralising political decisions in Westminster is the root cause of Britain’s malaise. Fine. Here is the purest case study of that process available anywhere in British government, sitting on his desk, requiring one decision. The letter put it to him plainly that failing to act would confirm him as another two-faced politician guarding Westminster’s grip rather than devolving anything at all.

The Home Office replied that the concerns of communities are central to its immigration reforms, and that it works closely with local authorities. I have read that sentence perhaps forty times now and I still cannot find the part where they tell me how many HMOs are in my county.

Devolution to whom, exactly

Now we get to the conjuring trick, and I want you to watch the hands rather than the patter.

Burnham talks about devolution constantly. He means it, in a sense. Power genuinely is moving out of Whitehall. It is simply not moving to your council.

It is moving to combined authorities. Mayoral strategic authorities, as they are now styled. Durham sits inside the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority, seven councils under an elected mayor, and the mayor is Kim McGuinness of the Labour Party, elected in 2024 and not facing the voters again until May 2028.

So when a Labour Prime Minister devolves asylum accommodation policy, he is not handing it to the Reform administration the people of County Durham actually elected fourteen months ago. He is handing it to a Labour mayor.

That is the mechanism. That is how you take an issue on which Reform councils have a mandate and a hard line, and relocate the decision to a body where Labour cannot lose. Nobody has to abolish us. They just move the table and leave us sat in the corridor.

And when it goes wrong, and it will go wrong, the mayor can say it was national policy and the government can say it was devolved. Two sets of fingerprints, no owner. I have watched enough of British government now to know that this is not a bug in the design. They did it whilst we were in the EU, they’ll use the same ‘wasn’t me guv’ act now.

The bit that should have been front page news

Here is the one I would put on a billboard, because almost nobody outside local government has noticed it, and it is the single most consequential thing to happen to English planning in a generation.

From 31 October 2026 a National Scheme of Delegation comes into force across every planning authority in England. It arrives via section 54 of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 and regulations laid before Parliament on 1 June.

What does it do? It abolishes the power of a ward councillor to call a planning application in to committee. Nationwide. Not restricts. Abolishes.

It also scraps the arrangement whereby a set number of public objections automatically forces an application onto a committee agenda. So a hundred neighbours can write in and it triggers nothing at all.

Minor residential applications must be decided by officers. Must. No discretion. A middle tier of applications is presumed to go to officers, and can only reach a committee if the chief planning officer and one single nominated member both agree it should. And if those two disagree, the tie is broken in favour of the officer.

Councils cannot opt out. The power authorities have held since 1972 to write their own scheme of delegation is removed. And if a committee decides something the regulations say an officer should have decided, the decision can be judicially reviewed and quashed.

Now hold that against everything I have told you about Article 4.

Our Article 4 Direction comes into force on 17 August. Its entire purpose is to force conversions of family homes into HMOs through the planning system so that they are seen, debated and voted on by elected members answerable to the street in question.

Ten weeks and three days later, the mechanism that gets those applications in front of elected members is deleted by statute.

I want to be careful and precise here, because this matters more than a good line. What I am telling you is what the regulations do in general terms. Exactly which schedule a small HMO change of use falls into is a technical question and our planning lawyers are on it. But under every reading of these rules, a conversion of a family home into a six-bed HMO is presumed to be an officer decision, taken at a desk, on paper, with no committee, no public gallery, no residents speaking, and no vote by anybody you can vote out.

You will still be allowed to object. Your objection will be read by a professional and filed. What you will no longer have is a councillor who can drag the thing into a room with a microphone and a camera and make somebody answer for it in public.

They have handed us a lock for the front door and are quietly removing the door.

Now check the dates against what they told Parliament

There is one more thing on the record, and once you line it up chronologically it stops being a talking point and becomes a straightforward account of being lied to.

In the Commons in April, the government’s position was that local planning authorities already have the powers to limit the proliferation of HMOs. Licensing powers. Enforcement powers. Robust powers, apparently. And then this: if planning authorities are struggling to apply those powers effectively, or feel they are lacking them, the minister wants to know.

April. He wants to know.

On 1 June, the same government laid the regulations that abolish the power of a councillor to call an application to committee.

So in April we were told we already had everything we needed. In June they took a chunk of it away. Somebody should be made to stand at that despatch box and reconcile those two months, and I intend to make it as awkward as I possibly can.

Well, he wanted to know. He can know.

We cannot apply our powers effectively because we are not told where the properties are. Planning enforcement requires knowing what has been converted. Licensing requires knowing who is housed and by whom. You have handed us a set of tools and withheld the address of the job, and now you are taking the tools back on the grounds that we were not using them.

That is not a council failing. That is a government department deliberately degrading the capacity of an elected authority to carry out its statutory functions, because publication would be politically catastrophic in exactly the places it has already lost.

So here is the deal I would offer the Prime Minister, and he can have it for nothing.

Publish the data, property by property, ward by ward. Exempt HMO change of use from the National Scheme of Delegation so these applications still reach a committee of elected members. And give councils, not combined authorities, a statutory veto over dispersal placements in their own area.

Do those three things and I will stand up in the chamber and say he has done something decent, and I will take the grief from my own side for saying it.

Refuse, and let us at least be clear about what has happened. Every hotel closed from here is not a policy triumph. It is a transfer of the problem onto the streets of the poorest parts of this country, with the only democratic checkpoint removed by regulation in October, executed by a man who built an entire career on the argument that Westminster should stop doing exactly this.

What we are actually doing about it

I refuse to write a column that is nothing but a howl. So here is the ledger.

Article 4. From 17 August, an Article 4 Direction covers the whole of County Durham. Converting a family home into a house in multiple occupation requires planning permission. That is a real win and I am not going to talk it down.

We waited twelve months to bring it in, and only because moving faster would have handed the objectors a legal challenge. Think about the world that implies. The legal risk sat with the council for trying to protect its own people.

I cannot lawfully predetermine a planning application and I will not pretend otherwise. What I will say is that this is a Reform-run authority, and that members drawn from these communities have views of their own about converting family homes into migrant HMOs.

Which is precisely why the delegation regulations matter so much, and why I am not going to stand here selling you Article 4 as a solved problem. For ten weeks it does what it says. After 31 October the applications keep coming and the elected members largely stop seeing them. Anyone in my position telling you otherwise is either not reading the regulations or is hoping you won’t.

The data. Full council passed a motion demanding the Home Office release the information telling us where these properties are. We will keep hammering that door until it comes off its hinges.

Every other lever. Licensing, enforcement, environmental health, council tax classification. If there is an instrument in the box, we are using it. Some of it is unglamorous and none of it will trend on X. It is also the only real work there is.

The complaints

I should tell you what talking like this costs.

I have had complaints lodged against me under the Councillors’ Code of Conduct by opposition politicians, for the sin of describing this situation in the plain English you have just read.

I will not apologise. Not this month, not in a month of Sundays. It is wrong, it is unjust, and it is a disgrace to the memory of the men and boys who went out and fought for this country, only for us to hand the place over as an arrivals lounge.

A government’s first duty is to protect its own people. Ours is failing that duty so consistently, and with such apparent serenity, that I have stopped being able to distinguish incompetence from intent.

As for the Code, and the honour, and the endless procedural tutting from people who have never once had to ring a crying constituent back with no answer: you can shove it.

Why I keep saying it out loud

I stand up at police and community meetings and I say, straight out, that if a particular HMO goes ahead the people inside it will not be safe.

I take no pleasure in that. I do not endorse it. I want no part of it. I say it because I believe it is true, and because a councillor who can see something coming and says nothing is worse than useless.

And it will be true for one reason. People feel desperate. They feel powerless. And they have concluded, with a fair bit of evidence, that the ballot box is broken.

They have voted for controls on immigration again and again and again. Every time, the machine found a way to ignore them. That is not apathy building out there. It is something colder.

Fix the borders and you fix that. Keep telling people they simply don’t understand the plan, and you will find out what happens to a country when a whole region stops believing its vote counts.

I’m as angry as Alex is. I’d wager you are too.

Keep fighting the good fight.