Housing enforcement is key to tackling illegal immigration

Over on X I’ve been having clashes with abolutsists who promote the idea of mass deportations. Over several posts I’ve outlined why I don’t think that’s a good idea. I agree that we need to see millions leaving our shores but I don’t see any scenario where mass deportations doesn’t rapidly descend into farce.

One of the problems with illegal immigrants is that they tend to learn our enforcement tactics and adapt accordingly. They do not want to be found, and they do not want to be deported, and they are not going to cooperate. I’m of the view that if you have to go into the weeds to find them, your policy is failing, and you are playing the game on their terms, and it’s a game you will lose.

As such, I think remigration measures are the way to go. Put simply, we need them to deport themselves. You might not have read my Remigration report yet, but I’ve outlined a two-pronged approach to this. We have to attack the means by which illegal immigrants can undercut British workers. Part of creating a hostile environment is making it so they’re is nowhere for them to bed down, and no work for them.

On that basis, local authority housing enforcement is a key pillar of any remigration agenda. We have to go after beds in sheds, illegally sublet social housing and overcrowded Houses of Multiple Occupation.

Usefully, a news report from last month that perfectly illustrates one of my points. Redbridge Council has reprimanded the developer of a building and its landlord for ‘riding roughshod’ over HMO rules and local people, and has issued the landlord with a £11,000 fine. Pellumb Mazreku of 75 Forest Road, Hainault, received the fine after his appeal was turned down by the First Tier Tribunal Property Chamber.

The discovery of the unlicensed HMO came after numerous complaints were made to Redbridge Council about the newly developed buildings on Cranbrook Road. These included claims that the houses had been built to accommodate the developer’s employees and contained multiple tenants.

During an inspection, it was discovered that the property was occupied by 12 people – eight adults and four children under the age of five – and badly overcrowded. The Council’s team also found a number of safety hazards, including a lack of fire detectors and fire doors, as well as insufficient refuse bins.

There are three points to take from this. Pellumb Mazreku, I think is an Albanian name. Albanians are a major contributor to London's organised crime, and as such, if you target them for investigation then you likely find they are major facilitators of illegal immigration. The second point is that you need local housing inspectors patrolling a regular patch, because you can bet rogue landlords will wait for the heat to die down and be back at it in no time.

The third point is that the fines are ridiculously low. To an Albanian criminal, £11,000 is chump change. We're treating it like a minor planning violation when it's a major crime, facilitating the exploitation of illegal immigrants. Pellumb Mazreku should have been bankrupted, imprisoned, then deported. We also need to speed up prosecutions.

When it comes to HMOs, we should also implement a regime of asset seizure. Any HMO landlord knowingly housing illegal immigrants should have their properties appropriated by councils. They can be turned into social housing, or group care homes for disabled people or women’s shelters. Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper talk about "smashing the gangs" and "breaking the business model" of smugglers, but this kind of criminality in housing is a major part of that model, as I detail in my report.

As such we need a zero tolerance housing inspection regime. This must be routine work, not a PR blitz by the Home Office. If the system was functioning properly, local authority housing inspectors would make a greater impact on illegal immigration than anything the Home Office is doing. As I keep saying, illegal immigration is symptomatic of a collapsing administrative state, dismantled through austerity and fashionable notions of government efficiency.

One of the reasons we don’t see this kind of routine work is that councils are obliged to re-home anyone they evict. This obligation must be deleted even if that means making illegals homeless. You might also argue that housing inspectors should just be able to call up immigration enforcement vans, but there is actually merit in cutting them loose. We want to heap on the misery so that word gets around that it simply isn’t worth it. You can try to stay, but life will be miserable.

Reinforcing this policy approach requires us to also get serious about is vagrancy. The French will gleefully drive a JCB through migrant tent cities. It should be noted that the dinghy crisis itself is evidence that the French “hostile environment” approach works very well indeed. We must make it abundantly clear that they won't get better treatment here.

One concept put forth by the Homeland Party is that of remigration centres, established in towns and cities with high densities of eligible individuals, which could offer one-on-one repatriation assistance for individuals and families. Food banks and homeless support services could be mandated to direct their clients to them.

The point I’m making is that problem migration is not solved by any one policy. It will take a raft of innovative measures, the cumulative effect of which will do most of the heavy lifting. If you adopt a heavy-handed policy of mass deportation, possibly putting the public in danger, migrants will make it increasingly difficult for the authorities, to the extent that immigration enforcement vans need heavy police escorts, and possibly police helicopter support (at £3200 an hour). Each immigration blitz could run into the millions.

I’m of the view that forced deportation operations are a last resort, and would actually be a signifier of policy failure. It’s activity you want to reserve only for the most dangerous cases. As a first resort, with upward of two million illegals in the country, you’d be looking at expanding the border force to a size comparable with the British army. This carries its own risks in that it only takes one wrongful death or wrongful deportation for the public mandate to collapse, and open us up to Windrush style compensation liabilities.

You would obviously argue that we first need to address all the legal problems with a great repeal bill, but for the moment this is fantasy politics. It is for us to advance workable policies for the political landscape of the present. Hardline solutions presuppose a hardline nationalist party is in power, but that isn’t going to happen any time soon. A more pragmatic approach is to promote policies that any government can adopt.

As to whether these remigration measures will be enough is another debate, but that does not make the case for abandoning subtlety and skilfully crafted strategies. There are obviously going to be those who will evade any and all attempts to promote self-repatriation, but again this will require tailored approaches. Cathartic hardline slogans may speak to popular sentiment, but retaining public backing is key to getting the job done. Rebuilding local government enforcement is not only a no-brainer, nobody sane can object to it.