Medway Village is a neat estate of 1930s semis in Perivale, a town bordering the outer west-London borough of Ealing. Under the drone of the A40 and the Heathrow flight path, it murmurs with the sounds of suburbia: lawnmowers, good mornings, an occasional wood pigeon’s coo.
But the optimism of Metroland feels far away today. Perivale’s library, a handsome coat-of-armoured redbrick, has been abandoned by the council. Its iconic art deco Hoover Building is a Tesco superstore. And the Medway Villagers now have a lot more noise to contend with: sirens, helicopters, fights, 24/7 music, revving Lamborghinis. Locals have seen armed police and snipers on rooftops, witnessed near-daily drug deals and individuals naked in the street.
Why? Anyone you ask produces the same obscure bit of housing jargon: HMOs. Houses in multiple occupation have spiked in the area in the past five years. Ealing Council officials believe there could be double the officially registered number of 28 on this estate. An HMO is a house share: a flat or house rented to three or more people who aren’t from the same household but who share amenities such as a bathroom and kitchen. They are handy for students, young professionals, singles and couples who can’t afford to live alone. But they are fast becoming a political problem.
The Home Office houses approximately 28,000 asylum seekers in 6,000 HMOs in England. They are a go-to for low-paid migrant workers and vulnerable people the council or state has a duty to shelter – the mentally unwell, ex-convicts, addicts, the homeless. Although the overall official number is falling, illegal bedsits are widespread: in 2023, councils calculated that at least 159,340 tenants were living in such unlicensed properties.
In Perivale, freshly shorn privet and Golf-cloistering drives repeatedly give way to scruffier addresses, all pebbledash crumbs and weeds reaching through cracks in crazy paving. Outside one, a satellite dish and computer chair are fly-tipped on the pavement. At another, there are six pigeonholes for each “flat” crammed into a three-bedroom house. Tenants are charged £1,200 a month. Some of the landlords are investors based as far away as New York.
“We once had to flee in the middle of the night and sleep in the car,” said Dragana Tomasevic, a 40-year-old school support worker with two young sons who lives next door to a problem HMO. A local of 20 years, she has had prison-leavers as neighbours. She was threatened with rape, one of her sons developed asthma from cannabis fumes seeping through the wall, and the whole family is sleep-deprived: hearing brawls and screaming in the night, her children have nightmares.
Another Perivale resident, Agata Michalewicz, 38, who has a six-year-old and a baby, remembers the house next to hers being divided up into a HMO a year after she bought her home in 2016. One of the new tenants shot her pet cat with an air rifle. “We just wanted a peaceful life, to have kids, be safe, and it’s a little hell.”
Resentment builds in places with high concentrations of HMOs. Squalid conditions caused by neglectful landlords – overflowing bins, fly-tipping, disrepair – and the chaos of desperate strangers living in close quarters can rob a place of its neighbourly feel. In some areas, this unease mingles with the perception that asylum seekers are crowding out locals and receiving preferential treatment. One Labour MP recently told me new-build flats under construction in the centre of town in his constituency are assumed by locals to be for Afghan refugees (they’re not).
Exploitative landlords carve up a house into as many rooms as possible, cram in no-wage and low-wage workers, and collect guaranteed rent directly through their housing benefit. This appears to be what’s happening south of the Tube tracks in Perivale, which is on the outer – and therefore cheaper – edge of the inner west-London local housing allowance zone. Properties are relatively cheap to buy in this area, but the benefit paid is a zone-wide average pegged to rates in upmarket locales like Fulham. So landlords clean up on above-market rents.
Labour is aware of the problem. It’s not new. Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, helped see off the advance of the far-right British National Party in Barking and Dagenham in the late 2000s, partly by cracking down on landlord neglect of HMOs on once-proud council estates. More recently, a 2022 Housing Select Committee report exposed the recent explosion of problem HMOs in Birmingham and warned ministers to tighten up regulations. Earlier this year, the Culture Secretary and Wigan MP, Lisa Nandy, told the New Statesman that “more and more houses have been turned into HMOs” in her patch alongside asylum accommodation with “several families in accommodation that’s only meant for one”, creating “a very transient community in what used to be a very settled community”.
Problem HMOs are more easily spotted than solved, however. Council budgets, shredded to confetti since 2010, cannot stretch to proper planning enforcement, and Britain’s chronic housing shortage makes it hard to limit house shares. “You can’t solve the housing crisis with HMOs,” said Tomasevic. “These people need love and support, they can’t function on their own – but we are not equipped as a community to help them. I’ve been through five years of war in Bosnia and I have never experienced this level of stress and fear. This is 21st-century Britain.”
Note: after this article was published, an Ealing Council spokesperson commented on 27 June that it “only issue[s] licences following thorough inspections and checks. Where properties fail to meet standards, licences are refused, revoked, or restricted.” The council added it was “expanding enforcement, including tackling anti-social behaviour and poor waste management in licensed privately rented properties. We are committed to raising housing standards and listening to residents’ concerns.”
[See also: State of emergency]
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This article appears in the 25 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, State of Emergency