Handling the media onslaught on housing and migration — October/November 2026
Attacks on asylum accommodation and HMOs continue
The Guardian revealed that “English nationalist” content creators posed as contractors to film inside a Leicestershire property housing people seeking asylum, going through their post and fridge and publicly identifying the street. Serco is investigating, YouTube has removed the video, and Asylum Matters has called for the addresses of shared asylum accommodation to be taken out of the public domain.
In Salford, the Manchester Evening News reports that an HMO was repeatedly vandalised and half a dozen homes had windows smashed during a so-called “action day” against “migrant HMOs”, leaving people on the estate terrified. Salford Council has denied that any of the houses were occupied by asylum seekers. Some are family homes.
In the North East, Chronicle Live reported a Green councillor in Walker urging Newcastle City Council to tackle the myth that people seeking asylum are housed in council homes, with the council’s housing lead promising not to back down on challenging misinformation.
We plan to run an article about attacks on HMOs in the next issue of the newsletter.
Local councils reject help for migrants
A particularly worrying story from Wolverhampton’s Express & Star showed the effects of local decision-making on a vital migrant charity, the Refugee and Migrant Centre (RMC), whose work featured in our May newsletter. Dudley Council’s Conservative leadership is refusing £120,000 of government funding for RMC’s drop-in, with council leader Patrick Harley saying the council shouldn’t be an “administrative arm” for government border failures. RMC, which has supported people across the West Midlands for more than 25 years, said it doesn’t decide who comes to the UK, that it helps people who are already here, and its early support saves public services money.
Other local news stories from imix include:
- Reform-led Bradford Council is considering dropping its City of Sanctuary status, which costs just £700 every three years, reports BBC News.
- In Suffolk, Barnham Parish Council is asking villagers whether to hold a referendum on “leaving the UK” over plans to house 1,250 people at the former RAF base, following a similar referendum in Piddington (see the September newsletter). The county’s police and crime commissioner tells BBC News he’ll fight the plans. A report commissioned by Reform-led Norfolk County Council estimates £9–£30 million in extra costs, though officers admitted to the Eastern Daily Press that it relies on assumptions rather than evidence. A local report says the base could only house 320 people.
- In Leverington, Cambridgeshire, more than 200 people joined a protest organised by a Reform councillor against plans to house 26 asylum-seeking mothers and children, covered by the Wisbech Standard and CambsNews. A fire in the village is being treated as arson.
- The Oxford Mail reports on a march planned for Bicester on 7 November that aims to link up campaigners near several large asylum-accommodation sites.
- In Salford, the council is taking down banners saying no to “migrant HMOs”, pointing out it doesn’t house migrants in HMOs, after officers were surrounded by a group with dogs.
- In Lancashire, the Reform-led county council said it will step back from supporting 745 resettled refugees, mostly Afghans who worked alongside British forces. Preston City Council has now voted to approach the government about taking that role on, in a moving debate where councillors spoke about their own families’ refugee histories (BBC News, Blog Preston).
- At Gronant, a village in Flintshire, plans to house asylum seekers have been scaled down to three properties, according to Herald Wales.
According to imix, when the Express, Sun and Mail reported that a Home Office contractor is offering landlords up to double the market rent, the most telling detail was easy to miss: the landlord at the centre of the story turned the offer down rather than evict council tenants. The real story there is about a contract market and a housing crisis, not about the people being housed.
The Argus covered a march in Brighton by residents who want families moved out of a hotel to stay in the city, near their schools and support. And in Hertfordshire, a councillor backed becoming a Council of Sanctuary, telling his father’s story of arriving as a young wartime refugee.
Meanwhile, a reminder that over 160 cross-party councillors have signed a joint statement expressing their solidarity with their constituents and condemning the government’s policies “targeting people who have migrated here, people seeking asylum, and people who are refugees”. You can see the statement by the Migrant Champions Network here. If you are a councillor, sign it here.
Farage proposes to suspend the UK asylum system
In what the Daily Mirror called “hitting the panic button”, Nigel Farage said a Reform government would close down the asylum system for five years, including scrapping the tribunal process and suspending ‘safe routes’ and resettlement schemes for a parliamentary term. Current asylum claims would be declared void.
The Mirror says the proposal comes as the Reform UK leader “attempts to reverse months of flagging poll ratings”, with the party now trailing Labour by several points and even falling behind the Tories in some recent surveys.
BBC News and the Evening Standard unpacked what it would mean in practice: leaving the ECHR, scrapping all safe routes for everyone except Ukrainians, and, Farage confirmed, no special treatment for women and children.
Reform’s threats widened further to include giving the Navy the ability to use “lethal force” against small boats and prosecuting “charities and volunteers who help people seeking asylum reach the UK”.
The sector’s response and coverage in the media received praise from imix:
- In The Independent, the Refugee Council warned the plan would drive desperate people underground and into the hands of exploiters, and Women for Refugee Women said it would shut the door on women fleeing gender-based violence. Asylum Matters also made a rapid response.
- The i Paper picked apart four big flaws: persuading countries to take returns, finding third countries willing to take people, an estimated £12 billion cost for 24,000 detention places, and the knock-on of leaving the ECHR, which is woven into the Good Friday Agreement and the UK’s trade deal with the EU.
- Jonn Elledge in The i Paper opened his column on the “lethal force” threats against refugees who have shaped Britain, from Lord Dubs to Abdi-Wali. He quoted Louise Calvey, of Asylum Matters, who said: “This meaningless clickbait is nothing new.”
- Elledge added: “In a world where social media algorithms reward rhetorical violence, and even supposedly progressive parties agree that Something Must Be Done About The Crisis In The Channel, Reform has had to take ever more extreme positions to keep winning headlines. As horrific as [Robert] Jenrick’s comments are, they should be understood less as a policy proposal than as the political equivalent of a toddler acting out for attention.”
Unions criticise Reform’s plan to turn council workers into ‘deportation police’
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism examines a Reform proposal to require council inspectors to carry out immigration checks on local businesses alongside their existing duties.
As part of its plan to focus “every organ of the British state” on hunting down, detaining and deporting “illegal” migrants, a Reform government led by Nigel Farage would require food hygiene, fire safety, trading standards and many other inspectors to do immigration checks on top of their other duties.
The proposal, announced on 19 October, has been described as “absurd and sinister” by the union UNISON and an “intensification of the hostile environment” by the mayor of a London council which, earlier this year, became the first local authority in the UK to refuse to help the Home Office undertake immigration raids.
Reform says these inspectors would be expected to relay information to a new ‘Deportation Command’ and a ‘Migrant Identification Centre’.
Council teams including trading standards and licensing officials occasionally take part in joint immigration operations led by the Home Office. Local authorities also share data with the government relating to a person’s right to work (when someone applies for housing or social care support, for example).
However, a growing number of councils, including seven in London, are refusing to cooperate with immigration raids where they legally can. Lewisham was the first to do so, passing a motion to that effect in July.
Migration benefits the economy — true or false?
Zoe Williams in The Guardian argues that every 100,000 immigrants lost to the UK costs the Treasury £7 billion, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. She said: “That figure is unsurprising if you’ve been concentrating at all — the calculation was made in 2024 — but at the same time completely staggering. Nobody ever says, ‘The chancellor’s going to be in trouble because of all those lost immigrants’; few people remark on, let alone decry, the very large numbers of migrants who have been lost due to policy decisions.”
However, Alan Manning of the LSE contests the OBR figure. He says: “It is almost certainly a large overestimate and it is conceivable there is actually a benefit. Even if the reductions in net migration have a small fiscal cost over the forecast horizon they are of migrants who, on average, are likely to be fiscally negative over their lifetime. Immigration of this type is akin to borrowing — it gives you more resources today at the expense of less in the future.”
However, look at individual migrant groups and the picture changes again, argues Equi in a new report, Stronger Together. For example, migrant nurses and doctors contribute £166,000 on average in taxes over their lifetimes, and a surprising 42 per cent of doctors have qualified abroad. Skilled-worker migrants made a greater average contribution to public finances than UK-born adults in 2022/23, accounting for taxes paid and public spending received.
Finally, in The Guardian, Gaby Hinsliff says Labour should “tell the truth” about the importance of immigration to the workforce and the economy.
This page of the newsletter uses imix as a source for several news items. We gratefully acknowledge — and recommend — their news service.
