Alwin Oliver slaps the walls with gusto. In total, he tells me, the landlord for this property just off Fratton Road in Portsmouth has spent £180,000 converting it from a traditional, Victorian terrace to a fully-functional six-bed house of multiple occupation (HMO). That includes adding en-suites to every bedroom, says Oliver, the property’s letting agent, not to mention the £5,000 invested in updating the fire detection and safety system, soundproofing each room, demolishing the snug to make way for a long, communal kitchen equipped with named cupboards, and throwing a new washing machine, two fridge-freezers and a spare bathroom for visiting tradesmen.
Each room, says Oliver, is occupied by at least one individual, though they usually won’t know or get to know the tenant living down the corridor. Most are young professionals, sometimes lifelong Portsmouthians, sometimes born outside the UK, but usually without any other means to clamber onto the housing ladder in a city where flats and houses are in short supply. But this isn’t a bad life, insists Oliver, himself a landlord. Though they usually stay for just 14 months, he says, HMO tenants benefit from an affordable, bills-included rental package and contribute to their local community — just like the six foreign-born tenants in the building, who all work either in the care industry or the local hospital.
It’s an image at odds with that of HMOs in countless local newspapers, Facebook forums and planning objections. From Bolton to Bognor, Durham to Dover, residents are up in arms, deriding HMOs as slum housing that brings only bored and boisterous tenants, each bringing anti-social behaviour to the street, all while piling untold pressure on local services bled dry by austerity. In Derby, HMOs have already been blamed for causing a “spiral of decline” across the city, while in Oldham and Wigan, Spelthorne and Worcester, local campaigners have mounted protests against a “deluge” of these new tenements arriving in their neighbourhoods.
Nowhere, however, have tensions escalated so sharply as in Portsmouth. Home to just over 210,000 people, most of them crammed onto 9.5 square kilometres of Portsea Island, competition for accommodation is fierce, with rents shooting up by 29% in recent years. Most properties on offer are flats, though while these command a much higher median rent than a place in an HMO (£1,125pcm versus £695pcm), the ability to charge slightly more per room often means that the ROI is generally higher. The result? Builders’ vans scurrying hither and thither under the screech of seagulls and the low burr of ships’ horns to plaster together new HMOs, while angry residents write increasingly terse objections to new developments.
Even getting an idea of how many HMOs exist is difficult. Officially, there were 4,326 such properties as of April 2024, according to Portsmouth City Council (PCC), though only 28% definitively possess a license to operate from the local authority (the absence of which, ironically, doesn’t automatically lead to the HMO’s closure). This confusion is reflected nationally. The most authoritative number for the total number of HMOs in England and Wales is 182,554 — figures that derive from the 2021 census and, judging from the leap in HMO developments reported in cities across the UK since (79 in Barrow-in-Furness; 141 in Filton, South Gloucestershire; 550 in Bolton), wildly unreliable.
Data on who’s living in these properties is also sparse or outdated. Often marketed to single, “young professionals”, anecdotal evidence suggests that this means just about anyone who can’t afford to put down a deposit on a flat or a house. That was the position Mike found himself in. Like many people living in HMOs, he was at the start of his career when he rented his room in North End, Portsmouth, bills included, for just £550pcm.
“People come and go,” says Mike, who had his room for three years and broadly enjoyed his experience. “It’s not a lie to say that some people are a bit dodgy. The vast majority of people aren’t. They’re just people looking for somewhere to stay, not permanently, for a good price.”
Eventually, Mike saved enough money for a deposit on a house 10 minutes walk away from his old room. He doesn’t believe HMOs bring anti-social behaviour, recalling how he was too busy treading on eggshells around his housemates to even think about throwing parties or being noisy. But what they do bring, he concedes, are cars. “There’s an HMO in my street,” says Mike. “A normal house might have one or two cars, but in an HMO, you might have five adults living there [and] they could have five cars.”
That problem should have been mitigated by Portsmouth City Council’s (PCC’s) decree that no HMO should be officially sanctioned if more than 10% of the homes within 100 metres are the same property type. “We, as a group, are fighting for 5%”, argues Russell Simpson, a councillor for the Portsmouth Independents Party (PIP) and one of the most anti-HMO voices in PCC. Simpson’s constituents are aghast at their streets being choked off by traffic, but they’re also echoing concerns similar to those in Derby, Durham and Dover about anti-social behaviour and the erosion of community spirit. Undergirding all this is a growing sense of bewilderment at how the planning system consistently favours HMO developers.
“If they don’t get planning permission, they can still build it,” says Simpson, referring to how landlords use “permitted development” rights to renovate their properties into de facto HMOs without having to consult the council — before obtaining a license to operate as a fait accompli. The resulting tidal wave in the north of Portsmouth, argues Simpson, has led to a breakdown in community feeling amid the churn of new residents, with at least one couple approaching him to say that their row no longer feels like a “family road” but “broken.”
But where, then, do you put those people who need affordable housing? HMOs are the only answer right now, argues Martin Silman — but that’s not something the council wants to hear, says the chair of the Portsmouth & District Private Landlords Association (PDPLA). Instead, says Silman, the PCC has increased the regulatory burden for landlords, pushing what he estimates to be 1,500 rooms off the city’s rental market and the most vulnerable residents into emergency accommodation. Worse, certain councillors have actively whipped up animosity against both tenants and landlords by encouraging anti-HMO protests in the public gallery during planning meetings, and even going as far as to tell one developer in the same forum that she should “hang her head in shame.”
“Certain councillors have actively whipped up animosity against both tenants and landlords”
The atmosphere grew so feverish last year, says Silman, that the PDPLA chairman warned that a “potential HMO Kristallnacht” against landlords was in the offing. After facing down calls to resign for the comment, Silman says the rhetoric on HMOs from the council has cooled. Even so, he says, residents and councillors still “talk about mixed and balanced communities, and what they mean is, ‘We don’t want anyone not the same as the rest of us,’ which isn’t ‘mixed and balanced.’ It’s just the label gets hidden behind.”
Silman’s concern stems from his claim that a disproportionate number of HMO tenants in Portsmouth are foreign-born. Just how far such hostility might go can be seen in the apoplectic protests against some of the estimated 6,000 council-run HMOs for asylum seekers. Angry opposition to one such property in Millom, Cumbria, led to a ban on new licenses, but not before “NOT WELCOME SCUM” was daubed on one of the properties being converted, with a builder’s tires slashed too. In Wigan, meanwhile, locals complained that a surge in HMO development by companies contracted by the government to house migrants was making it a “dumping ground” — a sentiment seized upon by Reform’s Nigel Farage who, ever-eager to personify the threat he sees in the massive rise in net migration in recent years, echoed accounts from residents in Dover about bedsit-dwelling foreign men loitering in their streets and stalking their children to school.
Similar levels of hostility to privately-run HMOs seem to be percolating in Portsmouth, says Alwin Oliver, himself a landlord. “I haven’t seen anyone directly concerned about the colour of somebody’s skin,” he says. “I think it’s a lot more subtle. It may even be unintentional… but, for example, we’re seeing people write objections to [an] HMO at planning stages because they believe that the people are going to be paedophiles, or what have you. And that kind of labelling, and stigmatising, of HMO tenants, is at its most insidious when most of the people living in HMOs are born outside the UK.”
For his part, Simpson thinks these insinuations from Oliver and Silman are nonsense, a “made-up narrative” crafted to “dismiss and dilute [the] real concerns of residents” (a planning consultant for developers I spoke to also disagreed with the premise that most HMO tenants in Portsmouth were foreign-born). Such arguments certainly appear to be a leap when sifting through planning objections on PCC’s website. While many do mention safeguarding concerns about HMOs near schools and the demise of “mixed and balanced” communities, those points seem more inspired by the petitioner’s general gut feeling about the HMO tenants as itinerant wrong’uns, usually found at the bottom of a long list of complaints about unwanted pressure on local services.
For his part, Darren Sanders hasn’t heard any xenophobic comments against HMO residents. Meeting me in another small back room in the council’s oversized offices, the PCC’s Lib Dem cabinet member for housing, and an HMO tenant himself, carries all the garrulous charisma of an old pol, sympathising with all sides of the debate while committing fully to none. Case in point: on the one hand, the role of HMOs in Portsmouth’s housing stock is “significant”, Sanders says, with many people unable to afford anything else. On the other, council inspections of licensed HMOs between 2018 and 2020 found that 32% of HMOs surveyed had “Category One” hazards — fire risks, black mould, structural defects and the like — compared to 12% in the broader rental market.
The problem, says Sanders, is that there’s little alternative to HMOs for affordable housing in Portsmouth. Not only did the government recently turn down an 850-home development in Tipner West: the site is, apparently, an irreplaceable haven for black-tailed godwits. Whitehall also raised the council’s housing target — an impossible diktat because, given the lack of space to build on Portsea Island, “we frankly don’t know where to put them.”
So, the council has tried to mend and make do, spending £100 million last year to buy back 570 council houses and convert them into council-run flats. It’s also trying to use its mandatory licensing framework for HMOs to favour good landlords and punish bad ones. But those efforts tend to be lost in public outrage at the planning system’s apparent sympathy with developers over and above residents. Sanders also claims that pushback on proposals by councillors is also discouraged by council bureaucrats. “I left the planning committee,” he says, “because I was told by the planning inspector that I didn’t know planning law, and if we carried on as the committee doing this, we’d get fined — even though, sometimes, you look at an application and imagine, ‘This isn’t a good place to live in.’”
Jen, who speaks to UnHerd using a pseudonym, has heard it all before. A resident of North End since 2017, she lives with her son and his partner on a street with five HMOs, one next door to their own house. As we chat in a near-empty Costa, Jen laments how one bedsit after another have been built in anticipation of guaranteed planning approval, and how her row is now so choked with cars that she’s afraid to drive to see friends and family outside the city for fear of returning to a parking space three streets away and a long, painful walk home on her arthritic knee.
“They seem to be able to do stuff for people to buy, but not cheap enough to help people get on that ladder if they’re in these rooms,” Jen says. She also worries about her son and his partner, who can’t afford a flat of their own, while the value of her home is declining. In the meantime, things keep getting more tatty, more expensive, more cramped. And Jen’s getting angry.
“My issue is the way people are treated in them,” she says of HMOs, though she’s afraid that the conversation about them could easily get hijacked by residents with bigoted agendas if action isn’t taken. “I have said to the Labour [MPs] office that, very soon, I will look at a city-wide thing, to try and bring everyone together and fight it that way. But, I am concerned that [there] would be people that are fighting for the wrong reason.”
The trouble is, nobody seems interested in actually building the kind of homes HMO tenants can afford, let alone want to live in, with successive governments seemingly incapable of setting targets for affordable housing and housing in general that actually satisfy demand. Absent new houses, the money to build them, the transport infrastructure to knit them all together, and the bloody-minded will to slash through a planning system that rewards NIMBYism over necessary development, the rental market will adapt by reaping ever-greater profits on ever-smaller spaces — and leave residents, councillors and landlords continuing to blame each other for the squeeze.
As I turn onto the slip road to the M27 and switch the radio on to another asinine panel show, I think about what Jen says about not being able to see a dentist anymore, or her GP, or if there are children in the rooms next door now that she’s seen a couple of toys for sale in the front garden. I think of frogs swimming in a saucepan. My reverie slips when I spy a broken-down SUV on the hard shoulder. Metres away, a woman in a traffic warden’s uniform sits with her head in her hands.
