Dear readers — remember Akhlaq Ahmed? He’s the hard-to-reach Labour councillor for Hall Green North whose constituents say won’t reply to their emails. In December, we tried to track him down at his monthly advice surgery (he wasn’t there) and his home (he wasn’t there either — it was rented out). Now, we’ve discovered that the house is a supported exempt accommodation HMO, the kind of property Ahmed claims to be cracking down on in his ward.
That’s today’s story, but be sure to check your inboxes tomorrow. We have an in-depth investigation into a major property manager in Birmingham, a group of companies clustered under the name Freshwater.
Residents in Moseley have been in a years-long battle with Freshwater for control of a set of flats just off Wake Green Road. Leaseholders have informed The Dispatch that their tenants have gone for months without hot water and heating, despite the astronomical costs they’re paying to Freshwater in maintenance fees. On top of this, between 2025 and 2026, bills are going up by a staggering 272.7%.
Importantly, Freshwater isn’t some mom-and-pop operation based out of Brum. Instead, it's a multi-billion pound private landlord with headquarters in one of the swankiest postcodes in central London. Read tomorrow’s article for the full story.
Brum in Brief
💻 In a bombshell revelation today, the local police chief has admitted that his force used AI to gather evidence to support their November ban of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Villa Park. The West Midlands chief constable Craig Guildford wrote to the Home Affairs Committee to apologise for relying on fake intelligence, revealing that details of a fictitious West Ham v Maccabi match that were included in police intelligence had been unearthed by the use of Microsoft Copilot. Guilford claimed that he and his assistant chief had thought the information had been discovered via Google. “My belief that this was the case was honestly held and there was no intention to mislead the Committee,” he wrote. However, he is facing mounting calls to resign over the controversy. (ITV).
👮 The man with the power to sack Guildford, West Midlands police commissioner Simon Foster, has called out MPs for bias against the chief constable. He says members of the Home Affairs Committee who are grilling Guildford have allegedly briefed journalists that he should be given the boot, despite the fact that the inquiry is ongoing. (The Guardian).
😷 New details about the ‘micro company’ that received £40.5m from a NHS scheme to train overseas doctors have been revealed. The programme at University Hospitals Birmingham trust (UHB) taught student doctors, mostly recruited from Pakistan, but was axed last week after a probe found evidence of exploitation, including unfair pay. The Daily Mail has revealed that the massive sum of public money went to a company called Scholar and Trainee Services, owned and run by Helen Bradin, 65, from her home in the Birmingham suburbs. Her firm appears to have been paid significantly more than the trainees — but she has refused to say exactly how much the Pakistani doctors received. (Daily Mail - paywalled).
🍛 Birmingham’s brightest chef — whose restaurant Opheem is the only one in the city with two Michelin stars — is launching a new business in London. Aktar Islam’s Oudh 1722 is set to open in April in Borough, serving Awadhi cuisine from the north of India, a historic style of cooking heavily influenced by Persian food. It “represents a rich culinary tradition I have always deeply respected, yet one rarely seen in its authentic form here in the UK,” said Islam. (London Standard).
🚆 Three years after the Birmingham to Manchester HS2 line was scrapped by Rishi Sunak — does anyone remember Andy Street’s fair weather threat to resign over the decision? — a new link between the two cities has been announced. The government has committed to the project to ease pressure on the existing West Coast mainline. However, the treasury has been light on the details, with no timeline or funding information currently available. Their first priority is Northern Powerhouse Rail, a scheme to improve east-west connections in the north. Keir Starmer said Labour is “rolling up its sleeves” to get that finished first. (Sky).
Today, we head to Hall Green North where residents are sick of supported exempt accommodation.
Do you follow Labour councillor Lee Marsham on Facebook? If you do, then you may have seen a recent post of his alerting residents that he was postponing his advice surgery due to the heavy snow. “I’m off to find some dodgy landlords to throw snowballs at,” he quipped, prompting the following gag from his former colleague, the Harborne & Quinton Independent councillor Martin Brooks:
Brooks was hinting at the many councillors who have interests in rental properties in the city — one of whom we’ve been keeping a close eye on. Before Christmas, we were asking questions about Akhlaq Ahmed, one of Labour’s two representatives for Hall Green North ward. We were curious to know: does he actually live in Birmingham? Locals had grown weary of not being able to reach him and he was regularly absent from council meetings. Our initial investigations raised some red flags. On 5 December, I headed to Tyseley Community Centre, where Ahmed’s monthly advice surgeries are held, according to the council website.
He was nowhere to be seen — a private party was under way and when I mentioned his name to the woman throwing it, she gave me a puzzled look. “There’s no meeting here tonight,” she said. “Try the church around the corner.” I did — it was locked up. There was nothing left to do but phone Ahmed himself, who promptly hung up on me when I told him who was calling. The following week, I got on the phone to the community centre’s manager, who checked her records — Ahmed hadn’t held a surgery there for five months.
As for Ahmed’s living situation, that same month I was given a tip-off and then was able to verify his links with three addresses: two commercial properties and a terraced house in Tyseley which is owned by his wife Tehseen. Assuming this was the family home, I paid a visit. But the door was answered by a tenant who hadn’t heard of the Ahmed family, let alone lived with them. A little bewildered, he explained it was a shared house which had been rented out to the occupants for almost a year.
While I’m still unsure where Ahmed lives when he is in Birmingham (do let me know if you have any intel) I have made a fresh discovery. The house I visited, on Allcroft Road, is a supported exempt accommodation HMO — the controversial type of housing for which landlords can charge rents above and beyond the normal housing benefit price cap, all paid for with public money.
The sector is rife with exploitation — especially in Birmingham — and Ahmed himself claims to be cracking down on it. On 2 December, he presented a petition to the council urging them to reject an application to turn a family home on Sarehole Road into a supported exempt HMO. Addressing the council chamber and speaking on behalf of his ward-mate Saima Suleman, and residents “across Hall Green North ward”, he said: “Residents have told us how the spread of poorly managed exempt accommodation is damaging the character of our streets and making everyday life harder for families.”
Ahmed has declared his interest in the property to the council — that his wife receives an income from the rent — but it isn’t clear if he has disclosed the type of rental property it is to Labour. When applying to be candidates for the council, Labour applicants are required to reveal if they have any connections to the supported exempt accommodation sector. The Dispatch understands that all discussions during the interview process are confidential.
But that’s not all. The company that manages the Allcroft Road property on behalf of Mrs Ahmed is Dawson Housing — a name you might remember from two stories we published last summer. We revealed that Dawson Housing had been set up in 2024, by the former CEO of one of Birmingham’s largest providers, Reliance Housing. Amer Ijaz headed up Reliance in 2020-2024, during which time it faced intense scrutiny, was sanctioned by the housing ombudsman, and was called out by Shabana Mahmood MP in parliament for “utterly outrageous behaviour” in its treatment of some of her constituents. Now, the Ahmeds are trusting his new firm to run their property in Hall Green North, despite the backlash against such housing by locals whom Ahmed claims to support.
That’s significant — supported exempt accommodation is a big issue for both local and national government. It has been two and a half years since the Conservatives passed the Supported Housing Act to address the problems, but implementation of the legislation has been delayed. Labour has said that the process will begin this month. But in the meantime, as Tory MP Bob Blackman told the Guardian recently, “[the sector] has been left in limbo and local authorities are doing their own thing.”
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14/1/2026 - correction: an earlier version of this edition said the NHS training scheme for overseas doctors was axed this week. It was axed last week and this has been corrected.
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