As ministers promise to close down hotels used to house asylum seekers after another summer of anti-immigration protests, in northern England their main alternative is also becoming increasingly contentious.
Houses in multiple occupation — rentals for unrelated groups of people who share facilities — are routinely used by Home Office contractors to accommodate asylum seekers while they await a decision on their immigration status, as well as by other government agencies looking to house ex-offenders, homeless people or those with addiction problems.
But their growing presence is triggering a backlash in poorer northern communities, prompting councils to tighten planning restrictions and Reform UK to mount vocal campaigns against HMOs as part of the rightwing populist party’s broader anti-immigration agenda.
In the past six months at least eight northern local authorities have moved towards stricter controls on HMOs, arguing that a rising concentration of such housing is having a damaging effect on communities.
Wigan Council, which says it has experienced a 166 per cent increase in large HMOs since 2021, is among them. The authority has long accommodated high numbers of asylum seekers, although it has not pointed to that as a reason behind the stricter regime, noting instead broader local concerns about antisocial behaviour, parking, community cohesion, crime, noise and the character of neighbourhoods.
Nevertheless Labour MP Josh Simons, whose Makerfield constituency is in Wigan, said voters “have got a really clear sense” that the Home Office’s asylum contractor Serco was among firms purchasing family housing in poorer areas.
“It’s obviously cheaper for companies to lower their costs by buying or renting out property in working class neighbourhoods, where there’s cheaper housing,” he said. “And to me that’s just wrong.”
Residents could see that “fancier streets” had fewer HMOs, he added, while “the poorer estates, the ex-council housing, have more. So even within the borough, it creates that sense that the state is almost punching a bruise.”
Simons is among a group of “red wall” Labour MPs in post-industrial constituencies voicing growing concerns about the impact of HMOs — and their connection to asylum in the mind of the public — on community cohesion.
Prospective housing has been the subject of vandalism in some areas, including Warrington, where a former pub was this month daubed with graffiti after reports that it could be converted into a HMO.
For the Home Office such housing remains a key alternative to highly controversial asylum hotels, however, which for two consecutive summers have been the focus of anti-migrant sentiment.
That pressure increased on Tuesday when Epping Forest District Council was granted a temporary injunction in the High Court against the owners of The Bell Hotel, where protesters have gathered for weeks.
Under the ruling, the 138 people accommodated by the hotel will have to be removed ahead of a full hearing into the planning grounds on which it had been opened.
Faraz Baber, chief operating officer of planning consultancy Lanpro, said the dispute around hotels “masks a difficult truth”, however: that they are often “more suitable” for asylum accommodation than the alternatives.
“The risk of dispersing asylum seekers into houses in multiple occupation is that individuals end up spread through residential neighbourhoods, including properties rented room by room,” he said. “That can create more disruption, not less, and presents significant challenges for local authorities trying to manage both housing needs and community cohesion.”
Even so, as the Home Office looks to end the use of hotels, its current contractors are buying up and leasing more local housing stock.
According to half-year filings published in June, Mears, which sources and operates asylum accommodation in the north east, Scotland and Northern Ireland, has bought up £23.8mn in housing stock so far in 2025-26 and expects to buy the same amount again by year end.
Ultimately the London-listed company intends to sell and lease back the housing, noting “a clear political drive to see all hotel accommodation exited during 2026”.
Serco, which operates the asylum contract in the North West and the Midlands, did not outline its procurement intentions in its half-year report.
But a report by Labour-led Warrington council last month warned that the company’s approach was hitting its own attempts to procure temporary accommodation for homeless families.
“The council has no control over these bed spaces or the procurement of them,” Warrington said of Serco, noting that the firm had so far procured 225 such spaces since April and needed to find a total of 406 by the same time next year.
“Quite often, Serco artificially inflates rental prices in the borough and competes against the council for temporary accommodation,” it added.
A person close to Serco said it worked within a price bracket set by the Home Office and consulted with local authorities on where it procured properties.
Warrington is just one local authority weighing up tighter restrictions on HMOs, although it said the move was “entirely separate” to concerns about Serco and not aimed at “any one provider”.
As the debate around HMOs has grown in many communities, Nigel Farage’s Reform has sought to explicitly connect immigration and such housing.
Since taking over Durham county council in May the populist party has moved, in common with seven Labour-led northern councils this year, to introduce an “Article 4” direction, a mechanism that means all HMOs must now seek planning permission.
Reform also successfully campaigned on the issue this year during the Runcorn and Helsby by-election campaign, where it unseated Labour.
This month Farage has repeatedly highlighted HMOs during a run of crime-focused press conferences, where he has claimed migrants posed a risk to women in particular.
“Whilst it’s the hotels that have the visibility,” he said, “and that’s where the protests happen, in some ways the HMOs are even worse than the hotels.”
For housing experts, the debate highlights the need for a vast boost to affordable housing, including new state-owned stock.
A year ago Kate Wareing, chief executive of housing association Soha Housing, wrote a report on the asylum system, whose conclusions are now being discussed in government.
Instead of spending £2.7bn each year with private contractors to compete in the same private rental housing market as people on low incomes, she recommended councils and housing associations be enabled to buy up properties themselves. That stock could be used initially for asylum and other temporary accommodation, before becoming long-term social housing.
“As the government works out how to exit hotels, we hope that it will use this as an opportunity to think long term,” Wareing told the Financial Times. “Spending money on renting rooms is expensive.”
A government spokesperson said: “We inherited a broken asylum system. At its peak, more than 400 hotels were in use, and work is ongoing to close all asylum hotels by the end of this Parliament. We will continue to work closely with community partners across the country, and discuss any concerns they have, as we look to fix this broken system together.
“The safety and security of the local communities within which hotels are located will always be our top priority, and the new models of asylum accommodation that we are rolling out will also help to ease the pressure on local housing markets.”
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