County Durham’s former mining communities are 300 miles away from the small boats of illegal immigrants reaching the British coastline via the English Channel.
The area has half the national rate of asylum seekers living within its boundaries and contains none of the asylum hotels that became flashpoints for riots in many parts of northern England last summer.
Reform UK’s anti-asylum rhetoric nonetheless found sufficiently fertile territory in these communities at last month’s local elections that it helped propel the party to power in county hall.
Councillor Darren Grimes, the new Reform deputy leader of Durham county council, tells stories about “fighting-age men” moving into the area, including next door to a single mother “worried about her children”. His party has vowed to block asylum seekers from local authorities it controls.
“We will be looking at every instrument we have available to us,” he told the Financial Times.
That message appears to have been heard in London, despite councils having limited direct power over nationally set asylum policy. Earlier this week, the Home Office paused placements in County Durham.
Reform’s success in Durham has followed a collision between deprivation and long-term decline with policy failure on housing and immigration.
Cheap housing in north-east England’s former pit villages has for some years been a draw for government departments and local authorities looking to house rising numbers of vulnerable people at the lowest possible cost, including asylum seekers, homeless Londoners and ex-offenders.
While County Durham accommodated just five asylum seekers between 2020 and 2023, the Home Office then changed its policy to spread them more evenly across the country. Arrivals in the area rose nearly 100-fold to 448 in the two years to the end of March, according to government figures.
“The issue in Durham is there’s not a lot,” said charity founder Darren McMahon of asylum seekers, “but they’re located in one or two places.”
The former mining community of Stanley, where McMahon operates the charity PACT House, is one of them. Eight miles from the picturesque university city of Durham, the parish and its neighbouring villages were once a hive of heavy industry.
Stanley’s last coal mine closed in the 1960s, a colliery wheel still standing as proud testament to the area’s past. In the 1980s and 1990s, the nearby Ever Ready battery plant, once the country’s largest such factory, and the British Steel plant down the road in Consett, closed in succession as industrial jobs haemorrhaged across the north.
The austerity that followed the 2008 financial crisis was a further shock. McMahon opened his doors a decade ago as other services were “closing theirs”, he said.
Since then he has seen a steady increase in need from local people, hit by a sustained cost of living squeeze and still recovering from the social isolation of the pandemic.
When the charity was set up, said McMahon, 10 to 15 people a week were coming for the leftover supermarket items. Now it can be 50 people a day, he said.
At the same time it has increasingly been helping asylum seekers, including people who have fled harrowing war and suffering in east Africa and Syria, placed in the village with “virtually no support” he said, often in poor quality housing.
“I’ve been in a couple recently that look like they’re out of the 80s,” said McMahon, with “little or no furniture”.
Lately the charity has also been supporting African care workers arriving in the country on visas, he said, whose agencies have housed them in an isolated community on low wages.
While that collective influx has led to tensions in a “very predominantly white British village”, McMahon said, his own ire was directed at the “absent landlords” leasing out large swaths of cheap housing to state agencies.
“We had one in Ireland with 40 or 50 houses,” he said. “What we’ve found is that the landlord can get guaranteed money with repairs [paid for] for four or five years.”
More than 20 miles south east of Stanley, Peterlee was built as a new town in the mid-20th century to house miners from surrounding collieries. Now its pebble-dashed housing has become a draw for agencies seeking low-cost accommodation, such as Mears, the contractor responsible for finding asylum housing on behalf of the Home Office.
It has prompted a reaction. Last year Mears scrapped plans to convert former council houses into “houses of multiple occupation” (HMOs) for asylum seekers after a vocal local campaign.
Mears told the FT this month that the group “recognises the importance of managing the impact on smaller communities” and only did so in consultation with local authorities.
On June 21, Mears announced that it had “agreed to a short pause on new property procurement” in County Durham.
“This allows time for further engagement with local stakeholders and to reflect on lessons learned,” it said.
The Home Office said the decision had been its own, not that of its contractor, adding: “It has been made because we believe we have sufficient capacity in County Durham.”
No discussions had taken place with Reform councillors, it said.
Reform was nonetheless quick to take credit for the decision. Grimes claimed that as a result of its win, Mears now viewed County Durham as “no-go territory”.
“Our residents made the scourge of HMOs a key issue on the doorstep,” added Grimes. “I am delighted we’ve managed to deliver for them so soon into our time in office.”
The pushback in Peterlee was not just about asylum housing, said local campaigner Matthew Tough. Such conversions had also been carried out to house ex-offenders, he said, adding that local people “take issue” with family housing in a deprived area being lost to “multimillion pound companies”.
“When the mines closed, the area wasn’t invested in properly and the economy never fully recovered,” he said. “Not that it is recovering, it is getting worse.”
People now fear increased levels of crime and antisocial behaviour, he added. “We are worried that the fabric of the community will simply be destroyed.”
Peterlee’s campaigners want Durham council to issue a so-called “Article 4” direction across the whole county under planning legislation, meaning that no HMOs — of any size — could be opened without permission.
Under extreme pressure due to the capital’s housing crisis, some London councils have also been relocating homeless families hundreds of miles away to communities in the north east in a process known as “decanting”.
Following an investigation by the Northern Echo newspaper, Easington’s Labour MP Grahame Morris, whose constituency includes Peterlee, raised the issue last year in the House of Commons.
“This is a national crisis, with local consequences,” he told the FT. “While the housing shortage is most acute in places like London, the consequences are being exported to areas like County Durham.”
Councillor Grace Williams, executive member for housing and regeneration at London Councils, acknowledged the capital’s homelessness pressures are affecting other places.
“But ultimately,” she said, “only national government has the powers and resources to turn the tide on homelessness.”
While the number of people relocated by London to Durham may have been small — at 16 households in the last three years, according to London Councils — the issue has become intertwined with concerns about asylum.
Last autumn a false rumour spread online that a new development of 900 homes in Newton Aycliffe had been sold to London authorities to house both homeless families and asylum seekers.
Durham council had to issue a message to councillors underlining that the rumour was untrue. But the episode underlined the sensitivity of housing in the local political mood.
In Stanley, McMahon of PACT House estimated that 20 to 25 per cent of local people felt particularly strongly about asylum seekers and that many voted Reform in May. He argued that their unhappiness was misdirected.
“At the end of the day, someone is making millions and millions of pounds. It’s not us, it’s not the community, it’s not the people who are placed here,” he said.
