Asylum seekers facing destitution need homes not cramped hotel rooms

While carrying out fieldwork for the National Audit Office’s recent report on the Home Office’s contracts for asylum accommodation and support, I saw first-hand how vitally important services are for asylum seekers who might otherwise face destitution.

Around 48,000 people currently get support from the Home Office and its contractors, under the UK’s international obligation to help asylum seekers. It is a complex challenge.

My team and I met families with children, couples and single people, people with physical and mental health issues, from many different countries speaking many languages. They were living in hostel blocks, in hotel rooms, in flats above shops and in houses ranging from inner-city terraces to post-war estates.

From 2012 to September 2019, the department provided accommodation services for asylum seekers through six regional contracts, known as Compass. We previously carried out a value for money investigation into these contracts and found that providers had struggled to establish their supply chains, resulting in poor performance, delays and additional costs for the department. In our latest report, we found that the Home Office has built on the lessons from Compass and has laid the foundations for an improved service.

In 2019, the Home Office replaced Compass with seven similar regional accommodation contracts and introduced a new Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility support service (AIRE), which asylum seekers can contact for help and advice. The new contracts are intended to improve services at a more realistic cost than the previous Compass contracts. The charity Migrant Help won the AIRE contract. Housing is provided by three accommodation providers, Clearsprings Ready Homes, Serco and Mears Group. Each provider manages the service in two or three of seven UK regions, under 10-year contracts which started in September 2019.

In the first full year of operation, we estimate that the new service costs around £560 per month for each accommodated asylum seeker, about 28 per cent more than the £437 per month under the last year of Compass. The Home Office is spending more on the new contracts after finding that Compass was under-priced and negotiating improvements to the service. The process used to award Compass contracts produced unsustainably low bids, some providers made losses and the quality of the service suffered.

Accommodation providers missed some performance standards in the initial months, although they are now broadly meeting them. However, the performance framework may encourage providers to prioritise new arrivals over those who have already been in initial (short-term) accommodation for a long time and some asylum seekers have faced long waits for longer-term housing.

Between July and October 2019, demand for services increased and the number of asylum seekers in initial accommodation – where they live while the Home Office considers their applications for support – rose by 96 per cent from 1,678 to 3,289. Most people were moved from this initial accommodation into longer-term housing in line with Home Office expected timeframes, but some stayed much longer. We found that 981 people in initial accommodation at the end of March had been there since the end of December 2019, a stay of at least 86 days. While they are in initial accommodation, asylum seekers cannot register with a GP or enrol their children at school.

Due to the high demand in the early months, the providers needed to use hotels to house many people because their usual short-term accommodation – often hostel-type blocks – was full. On average, more than 1,000 of the 2,800 people in initial accommodation were in hotels each night from November 2019 to March 2020. Long stays in hotels can be harder for people with children. In some cases, we saw that hotels lacked play facilities or safe outside space for children. I met one family staying in a hotel in several separate rooms, which meant their doors had to remain open and children used the corridor areas as play space.

However, most people who were already housed under the Compass contracts did not have to relocate because of the transition to the new contracts. Only 5 per cent of people needed to move compared to around 10 per cent when Compass replaced a previous system, in 2012.

We found that the advice and support service (AIRE) failed its users in its early months and despite some improvements, has not yet delivered services which consistently meet the Home Office’s requirements. Migrant Help initially expected to receive 21,400 calls per month to the AIRE helpline, but received more than twice this number. As a result, only a fifth of helpline calls were answered. When I spoke to charities about the impact of this lack of capacity, I was told that long waits for support had led to some asylum seekers giving up on the AIRE service altogether, opting to rely on the voluntary sector instead.

Call waiting times have improved since Migrant Help has recruited more staff. When people do get through, an interpretation service is quickly provided. We listened to calls from Amharic and Farsi speakers, for example, when the call handler quickly brought an interpreter on the line and then had a fluent three-way conversation.

Migrant Help has frequently not met the Home Office’s requirements for other aspects of the helpline’s performance, such as the time taken to transfer callers to a specialist adviser, or for face-to-face advice and support. Between September and March 2020, 2,800 asylum seekers did not receive an induction briefing within one day of moving into initial accommodation. Migrant Help has also taken, on average, three to four times longer than expected to complete application forms for failed asylum seekers who were facing destitution.

It is too early to determine whether the £4bn contracts for asylum seeker accommodation and support are value for money. The Home Office should collaborate with the providers to address early performance issues and to meet its future aims for the service. The department needs to address the challenges we identify to deliver value for money over the life of the contracts.

Tom McDonald is the director of Home Office value for money investigations at the National Audit Office - the UK’s independent public spending watchdog.