HMOs: Kirkby's elephant in the room

“I am sick and tired of Kirkby being a dumping ground,” says Steve Smith. 

The independent councillor for the Whitefield ward sits opposite me in a café, half reclined but bristling with pique. If he’s right about people from Kirkby — that they’re welcoming, amiable, but quick to speak their mind — Smith’s underdog local election win in 2021 is more fathomable: he embodies those same qualities. Previously a part of Merseyside Fire and Rescue for thirty years, Smith feels he’s still fighting fires. He elaborates on what’s been dumped on his home town.

“Anything that’s not right. Whether it be HMOs, whether it be refuse skips, whether it be Sonae,” — the chipboard factory, now closed, where two workers died after the company failed to produce a risk assessment — “whether it be the medical waste incinerator,” — the proposed high temperature treatment facility for hazardous waste in nearby Simonswood — “Just anything nowhere else wants. The worst conditions.”

I’ve actually come to Kirkby to meet Brian Johns, Smith’s fellow independent councillor. The previous day, Johns put out a shocking statistic via their joint Facebook page: that since April, Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council (KMBC) had received 28 HMO applications for licenced properties in Knowsley, of which 20 were in Kirkby. But Smith, eager to share the town’s problems, gets to me first. 

“A few months ago, the figures were worse,” Smith says. “Of 24 applications, 19 of them were Kirkby. So that’s nearly 80%.”

A HMO — or a house of multiple occupation — is a property rented by at least three people who are not from the same household, in which they share a toilet, bathroom, or kitchen. Often they are converted from traditional family-sized detached or semi-detached houses, already making them controversial. The crowded conditions have also been linked to antisocial behaviour.

According to residents I speak to on the way to meet Johns, other issues include a dearth of parking spaces and a paucity of waste disposal provisions to meet the needs of multiple individuals residing in one house. And, startling as they are, neither Johns’ or Smith’s figures include unlicensed HMOs: any with less than five occupants.

“Where I live it’s full of them,” one resident who lives in Westvale tells me on my way into Kirkby. “And several of [the tenants] need mental health supervision,” she says. “It’s not their fault, obviously, but why does it have to be right by the school? We weren’t consulted.”

"They just don't get the ethos of Kirkby," Smith says. "We used to have pensioners flats," – he gives the example of the now-demolished Mercer Heights high-rise, and other former council properties – "If you lived in one, you used to be part of the community. Unfortunately, the people who are being put into them now, they come with issues, a lot of them — alcoholism, or drugs. Prostitution is another problem."

Four years ago, Liverpool city council introduced a zone restricting the number of HMO developments in the city centre, L8, the Dingle, Anfield, Kensington and parts of Wavertree. But they’ve been a hot topic across the city region of late. In June this year, hundreds of campaigners in Aintree Village — just a ten-minute drive from Kirkby — convinced Sefton Council to propose a limit on HMOs in the local area. In July, Liam Robinson, head of the city council, suggested securing a mix of temporary and move-on accommodation including HMOs to help tackle the city’s housing crisis. And last week, the Liberal Democrat opposition put out a petition urging the city authority to widen the restriction zone it implemented in 2021.

“The thing about HMOs,” Smith says, his broad, stubbled face creased by an incredulous grimace — “and this really pisses me off,” he chuckles before continuing — “is that the council will put out a consultation, or a ‘meaningful consultation’, they call it, to ask local residents what they think. Many will object, and the council? They’ll just ignore it. It’s a box-ticking exercise.”

"That's just disrupting the whole community," Smith continues. "They've lost sight of what it's all about: a community ethos."

We’re sat in a busy Coffee House in Kirkby’s town centre. My walk from the train station was picturesque if not idyllic, taking me over the Kirkby Brook, past the Millennium Gardens and near St Chad’s, the Norman Revival church from which the town derives its name. (For non-Scottish readers, “kirk” means church, and although Kirkby is a post-war “new town”, the original Saxon parish is named in the Domesday Book.) But its centre looks more like a retail park than a real social hub, with grey, flat municipal buildings mixed in with drab commercial outlets. 

When Johns arrives, after settling in with a pot of tea, he largely concurs with his colleague. 

“Do you know what the dirtiest word in Kirkby is?” Johns asks me. "‘Consultation.’”

Over the next hour or so, I can see how Johns complements Smith’s more direct manner. Although he speaks slowly and with a softer accent, he’s a born storyteller, with a tendency to govern, if not dominate, conversations. The tale he and Smith tell is compelling: about Kirkby’s genesis from mostly farmland, with slum clearances in Everton, Anfield and Scotland Road providing its first population swell, to a manufacturing economy based around the nearby industrial estate that employed 26,000 people, to the closure of its Birdseye, Kraft Foods and Kodak factories and Kirkby’s economic decline. Many, such as Johns, feel Kirkby was better off under Lancashire's authority, which they were until 1974.

This all adds up to a sense of abandonment: Kirkby as Liverpool’s unwanted bastard, Lancashire's disowned son and Knowsley’s neglected stepchild. While £163 million is lavished upon Huyton’s town centre and Prescot gets a £63 million Elizabethan theatre (“Don’t get me started on Shakespeare North,” Johns says; “Don’t get him started,” Smith agrees), Kirkby’s more modest requests are ignored.

“What’s needed is social housing,” Johns says about the HMO situation. Many HMOs will have originally been council housing stock before the Thatcherite sell-off. And HMOs, Johns says, mostly house transients and out-of-towners.

Over the decades, homes with multiple occupants have provided accommodation for people from many walks of life, from itinerant tradesmen to students. The commonality, though, has indeed been short-term stays. While neither councillor wishes to blame individual tenants, this is not congruent with the communitarian, familial ethos of Kirkby residents — what Smith calls their “clan-ish” instincts — something that’s already taken a hit due to Knowsley having been the only metropolitan authority in England not offering A-Levels. (The council say they have secured the return of some A-Level provision, so to say it is nonexistent would be misleading.)

“Imagine having to get three buses just to get to school,” Smith fumes. 

As I think of how this would erode family time and a child’s sense of place, the point becomes clear: housing, jobs, education, and the social fabric of an area are all tightly interlaced.

Later, I put some of these concerns to KMBC. Regarding Kirkby's sense of unbelonging to Knowsley, a council spokesperson points out that the town left Lancashire's authority half a century ago. Although they're "cognisant of the decline of old industries" in that time, "Knowsley Business Park continues to be a thriving hub for business and commerce" and "to suggest it is in decline is unfounded."

Despite Knowsley being the hardest-hit local authority by government cuts in the country since 2010, their spokesman says Kirkby has benefited from £62 million investment over a decade, including new schools, a leisure centre refurb, new health facilities, a £2.2 million transformation of the multi-storey parking lot, market redevelopment, green spaces and a new train station at Headbolt Lane – not to mention KFC, Taco Bell and the very Coffee House in which I was sat.

But back in that café, the independent councillors talk about the relative (de)merits of housing association Livv, which in the summer finally settled an eight-month strike and pay dispute with its workers, and developer Barratt & David Wilson Homes (BDW), who will soon be building 800 homes on a brownfield site south of Cherryfield Drive — the very spot where Everton once considered building their new stadium before the move to Bramley-Moore Dock. 

“But that land is contaminated with asbestos,” Smith says of the 56-acre area, sold by KMBC to BDW in September 2021. Despite hundreds of objections and campaigning by the Kirkby Residents Group, KMBC signed off on the development in February this year. 

According to their spokesperson, the protesters are very much a minority. KMBC, they say, "received just over 200 objections – out of a Kirkby population of 44,589 people." They say BDW "must submit a robust asbestos risk mitigation plan," which will "be closely monitored by Environmental Health and Planning Enforcement."

Both council leaders and BDW insist the Cherryfield plans will be safe. Just as Kirkby's historic authority, Lancashire county council, are sure the medical waste disposal site will be: the proposed incinerator will have the capacity to burn thousands of tonnes of hazardous material, but an independent report Lancashire commissioned found no fundamental concern regarding the health impacts of air emissions. In opposing its construction, KMBC and their constituents are in agreement, but the Stopgate Lane site lies within Lancashire’s local jurisdiction, and the latter have approved it pending a Section 106 agreement.

Regardless, between those schemes, it’s easy to understand Smith’s “dumping ground” complaint. And even if they are safe, Johns points out that none of the 800 homes BDW are building — only 10% of which will be categorised as “affordable” — will be social housing.

While I’m in Kirkby, I also speak with local resident David Hitchmough, who shares his home town's sense of abandonment. "Were you trying to get to West Kirby?" he jokes.

A cheery young man and a research fellow at Liverpool John Moores University, David hopes to also become a councillor. His enthusiasm for local issues has led him to become Smith and Johns’ sort of unofficial frontman on social media. Agreeing with the caricature of Kirkby as “Liverpool’s Australia” — a kind of penal colony for undesirable elements — David also takes up Johns’ point about HMOs mostly being temporary homes for out-of-towners. Like Smith, though, he’s quick to note that Johns’ point is not about blaming outsiders, whether they’re migrants or otherwise. 

“Reform has a big presence in Kirkby,” David says. He acknowledges that Johns’ Facebook post attracted some comments attacking “illegals”, and the native landlords who house them as “traitors”. These issues, he says, are “regularly hijacked” by the right-wing, and that the overarching conversation should be about first-time buyers competing with HMO operators and the lack of social housing. 

“I worry about the young mums who come into where I work,” says Thea, a healthcare professional I also speak with. (Thea is not her real name — having only moved to the area 18 months ago, and as she’s employed by the council, she does not wish to be identified.) “How are they going to afford houses that are between £200,000 and £300,000?” 

Thea moved to Kirkby from Hartley’s Village, the model village built in the 1880s by William Hartley for his jam factory workers in Aintree, where residents successfully campaigned against a HMO's establishment. But like David, she is worried about how HMO approvals by KMBC will drive up the price for families in Kirkby, fraying those social fabrics further. 

It's fair to say that KMBC do not share these concerns. A council spokesperson is unequivocal about the benefit HMOs bring to an area, telling me that they "very much play an important part in a well-functioning local housing market" and that "far from preventing local Kirkby residents from accessing accommodation, in fact it is the opposite" as they provide much needed one-bedroomed accommodation for single people and couples. The 28 applications Johns mentioned are "mainly in relation to pre-existing HMOs" and "are very much welcomed" as the owners are keen to ensure their standards align with the council's.

As for the erosion of social cohesion? "The main factor affecting community ethos and rootedness is the publication and sharing of inaccurate and often misleading information," the council spokesperson says. They point out the council is not a social housing provider and its lack is a national, not a local issue, with a variety of causes. Nevertheless, Knowsley has "had an immensely successful track record of new housing delivery," with a whole 25% being classified as "affordable" housing.

To try and illustrate that HMOs are just the thin end of a wedge of underinvestment, Smith and Johns show me around the town centre’s highlights, including multiple closed shopfronts, the market (which “used to be open every day,” says Johns) and the multiple fast-food chains the KMBC spokesperson touted. (“And people wonder why [Knowsley] has one of the highest rates of child obesity,” Smith says.)

When The Post was last in Kirkby three years ago, Smith had only been in the job a year. Kirkby was suffering from a lot of the same problems, and similar resentments towards KMBC and its apparent favouritism of other towns. But it did, at least, have a Morrisons — the first supermarket to open there in 40 years, and as one elderly couple we spoke to described it, “the best thing that’s ever happened to Kirkby”. In 2025, the Morrisons is still hanging on, but its ‘Market Kitchen’ café — a crucial meeting spot and community area for Kirkby — has permanently shut. 

Also in the centre are two unusual public sculptures. The first is the Huyton Tree, a garish metal cast of a 400-year-old dead tree in Huyton, complete with a giant yellow disc wedged in its artificial branches. (“So the sun never sets on the Huyton Tree,” Smith says drolly.) The second is a giant silver elephant in a boat to commemorate the poet Edward Lear, who in the 1830s painted the menagerie at Knowsley Hall, some five miles away. Some anonymous artist has silly-stringed the elephant's eye.

“Neither of these have anything to do with Kirkby,” Smith says, although I do quietly wonder about locals' apparently pachydermous memory for affronts. 

Before I leave, the councillors effuse about the poets, artists and sportspeople his town has produced, some of whom are claimed by Liverpool despite the city’s disownment of Kirkby: actors Stephen Graham and Andrew Schofield, footballers Leighton Baines and Phil Thompson, championship boxers John Conteh and Nick Ball. (“Steve Rotheram!” someone offers, drawing a sardonic grin.) 

“We have so much talent here,” Smith says, looking out on a rainy landscape of disused tower blocks, a massive carpark, and a Taco Bell. As with so many of Merseyside’s hinterland towns, the incongruity between Kirkby’s people and its state of affairs is palpable. 

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