Thank you very much to our witnesses for coming in front of us today. This is our final session on the report we are preparing on asylum accommodation and contractual arrangements. We are not looking at the policy; we are looking at the way the contracts are run and the value for money for the taxpayer. I am very pleased to have Migrant Help with us today. I wonder if you could introduce yourselves, starting with Caroline. Caroline O’Connor: Thank you. I am Caroline O’Connor. I am the Chief Executive of Migrant Help.

I am Juliet Halstead, Deputy Director of Asylum Services.

Thank you very much. We do not have many questions but there are a few things that we do want to cover, and we are very grateful to you for coming in. I know that it is unusual that we have witnesses after the Minister but we know that there are extenuating circumstances and we are very grateful that you are here. We will start with Chris Murray.

Thank you very much. Can I just draw the Committee’s attention to my declaration of interest and the support that my office receives from RAMP? Thank you very much for coming in. The contract was set up in 2019 and a lot of things happened in the interim that were not anticipated. Could you talk about what those challenges were, how Migrant Help encountered them, the impact that it had on your service delivery and how you adjusted? Caroline O’Connor: I am happy to start and Juliet will probably pick up on things. The biggest initial change was covid, quite unexpectedly and early in the contract. People stopped moving through the system. There were still arrivals in the system. Because we support people when they first arrive in initial accommodation and then they have access to the helpline, that increasingly inflated the numbers of calls that came into the helpline. It also created a different nature to the calls. They would call to tell us that the boiler was broken or there was a heating problem, and they started calling to tell us that they had a scratchy throat and ask what they should do and how should they isolate. Then people were shifted to hotels and there was an increasing use of hotels. There was confusion about how they could move in hotels and what help they could get. We became a more welfare support organisation, not just a transactional organisation taking issue reports and processing forms. We always had an aspect of that but the proportion of calls greatly outnumbered. We also saw a lot of calls that were not technically covered in our contract. We get paid for issues reported or advice and guidance given. We do not get paid if something does not fit a narrow criteria. Our charitable work within the calls increased to about 20% of the calls received, and we received no funding for it. Post covid, there were relaxations in restrictions, so increases in movements, but the hotel use did not decline and continued to increase. We saw the total volume increase to more than double the cap on the AASC contracts in the early days of the pandemic and the early days of the contract. We saw each year increasing call volumes to the call centre. Once people got used to calling us, the call volumes increased and the volumes far exceeded even the highest model given to us by about sevenfold. We scaled up staffing throughout that time but keeping pace with it was very difficult. The political climate also shifted slightly and there was a tension to changes in legislation like NABA and the Illegal Migration Act. We were told that there was potential for people to become inadmissible, that asylum numbers would drop, and that there was accelerated decision making, and that would affect the numbers in the system. We had to make judgment calls about whether or not we should recruit for the numbers we were seeing or whether they would drop off a cliff quite quickly. Managing in that climate was very difficult. You will be aware that a large number were inadmissible around June last year when they had stopped all decision making. It created quite a large backlog of people we were dealing with, for whom we could not do any more than answer the phone and help, and that created its own welfare crisis for people, mental health issues and greater difficulties. They call us because that is who they know to call. We continued to support people throughout. Our numbers are still exceedingly high and the number in the system is still quite high, despite the drop in volumes. We have been trying to mitigate that with some strategic projects. As a charity, we can put our resources back into the work. We have a mental health project and we have mum and baby projects to try to mitigate some of those effects.

Thank you very much. What we are talking about here is possibly one of the most vulnerable groups you can get. These are people who are far from home in an unfamiliar environment. Potentially, a lot of them are proven to be refugees fleeing violence. Are you confident that your scaling up provided the necessary services for these very vulnerable people or do you think some balls would have been dropped? Caroline O’Connor: I think some balls would have dropped. We did not scale up as fast as we would have liked and it was very difficult to scale up at that pace in the middle of the pandemic and to train new people to be competent and to deal with people with the expertise and the speed needed. We grew from—what, 28 advisers?

Yes. In 2019 our total staff was 156 and we are now at 298. We also have around 400 in our supply chain. Certainly, in our first response centre, the helplines, there was a lot of challenge around wait times on those call lines. We are now up to 337 staff in that environment—there were fewer when the contract started. I think we have adjusted and we have adapted. One of the challenges we have had around the call line specifically is that we are a charity. We want to support the client who is in front of us and we want to provide a quality service to that individual. That often means that we are on the phone much longer than we would necessarily forecast. We are raising hundreds of safeguarding incidents every month to support those clients to work with the accommodation providers. We focus on the quality of our service rather than some of the measures that we are measured against, which are quite quantitative.

Okay, but the quantitative measures you do miss quite frequently. Your KPI data was inadequate in 2021 and in 2022, and you were found to be consistently failing to answer phone calls within contractual timeframes, even when they were relaxed. Do you accept that you are failing on the quantitative measures? Caroline O’Connor: On the call wait time quantitative measure, yes, we are. Overall, we are achieving 76% of the KPIs. We absolutely want to do better than that and need to do better than that. However, it is worth noting that in the earlier evidence, there was discussion about changes to KPIs. We have had very few and the phone line KPI has not changed.

We have some questions on KPIs coming up.

Yes, sorry. My final question is on the value of the contract over the course of it. One of the things that we are looking at here is that the asylum costs have gone up hugely throughout these contracts: they cost the taxpayer £2 million a day. The value of your contract has gone from £229 million to £385 million, I think, which is 41%. How has this additional investment from the Home Office allowed you to respond to the increase in demand? Has it been sufficient? Caroline O’Connor: The additional funding has been sufficient to employ additional advisers. Our management fee has not changed. It has been indexed year on year, but the management fee is supervisory and management for the additional staff. That has not been renegotiated or changed at all. We are using more of the variable cost to fund that.

What is the management fee, sorry? Talk me through that. Caroline O’Connor: Within the contract, there is an element that is a set amount each month and that is only changed by indexation, regardless of the number of people in the system or transactions you undertake. The variable cost is for issues reported, advice and giving guidance, and ASF and induction raised. There are two elements to the contracts. When the volume shot through the roof, the variable costs increased but the management fee did not.

I would add that we have invested a huge amount. When we took on the contract in 2019 there were just under 50,000 asylum seekers in the system. If you include all the contingency accommodation, we are now just under 105,000. The database that we built at that time has been creaking at the seams. It was not fit for purpose and it was not going to be future-proofed for the remainder of the contract. We have just invested £1.8 million in a significant upgrade to our infrastructure. Two years ago we introduced new telephone platforms to make sure that we could really monitor quality and quality assure all our calls. All our calls are recorded now for all our interactions with clients. We are launching a new technology and transformation strategy as well, again around future-proofing. There has been significant investment as well for us to develop and future-proof our services.

Building on the same narrative that has kindly been set by Chris to do with KPIs, Chris is right to point out that your contract to deliver AIRE services, which is predominantly the 24-hour helpline and online webchat, has increased from £229 million by about 41% to £385 million, money that is coming from the Home Office to you as an organisation to deliver services against set KPIs. Yet reading the KPIs, very few are even being met. Why is that? Caroline O’Connor: I would dispute that very few are met. We are achieving 76% of the KPIs in 2024. However, we do need to improve. The reason they are not being met is that the KPIs were set up for a system in 2019 that is vastly different to what we are seeing now, a hugely increased number of people arriving. The telephone lines are increasingly busy and for complex cases that we did not have before. Mental health issues, for example, are very predominant. In addition, there was at one point the use of just over 400 hotels, and there are still 200 hotels in place. We have teams in initial accommodation in different parts of the country that would typically see somebody as soon as they arrived, provide them with an induction, provide them with an ASF1 form, and be there in that initial period where they could come and ask questions. A lot of that is remote with the people in 200 hotels across the country, which means they need to call in a lot more than ever envisaged in the system. They may not find it as easy to navigate the system when they cannot just drop down to our office and ask a question. That has made some of the KPIs more challenging and we are not in the hotels.

Okay, but this is a huge amount of taxpayers’ money that is being given to you as an organisation. One of those KPIs, KPI 4a and 4b, is in relation to answering phone calls. This is a system that is set up to help those who are the most vulnerable. The Home Office relaxed the KPI on the phones being answered within a minute to every 10 minutes, yet you have failed consistently to meet that KPI, despite it being relaxed. Caroline O’Connor: It is no longer relaxed. It was relaxed for a period. It is back to a minute.

Have you met that KPI yet? Caroline O’Connor: We have not yet met that KPI, but our average wait time is a minute on—

A minute and four seconds, yes. Caroline O’Connor: —the FRC helpline. So we have substantially reduced the wait time. That is with new systems, new telephone lines and people on the phones.

Another KPI was for submitting change of circumstances forms for asylum seekers in time that has been missed in most months. Why is that?

That is KPI 7b. That was missed for a short period. It has certainly been compliant for at least the last six months. The pressure there is the volume in the system and people who are experiencing, as it says, a change in circumstances. We complete somebody’s eligibility form and an asylum support form with everybody when they arrive in the asylum support system. We are obliged to do that usually within the first five days of arrival. That is exceptionally challenging because it was envisaged at the start of the contract that we would be co-located with those clients and people would be moved through initial accommodation. Now they are in hotels spread across the whole of the UK where we do not have a presence, and we rely very heavily on the accommodation providers to support us with that, helping us to facilitate that access. It remains particularly challenging that we might have completed that asylum support form a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, and people’s circumstances are changing because of being in that contingency accommodation for such prolonged periods of time. That then drives changes to people’s circumstances and us needing to advocate on their behalf around different accommodation needs and health requirements. As a result of the pressures in the system, it drives that volume somewhere else. We have responded now. We are now compliant with that KPI, but we did have a period, a number of months, where it was challenging.

Does the same reasoning apply to the fact of more than 1,300 failures to provide an induction service to new arrivals within the required timeframes?

We did provide inductions. We do provide inductions. Again, the KPI is not based on the quality of the service that we provide, it is purely based on the timeframe that we have done that in. Doing that within five days for new arrivals when they are in a hotel and might not have a telephone and where we are not co-located is exceptionally challenging. We are inducting everybody. We are supporting everybody to complete the asylum support form, and the volumes are exceptionally high. For just the clients in initial accommodation we are completing over 4,000 a month at the moment, but sometimes there are delays with that. As a result of covid—again trying to make sure that vital information goes to the client at the earliest stage so people understand the system, the process and how to make contact with us—we produced a lot of additional literature in 2022. It is pictorial, it is translated into the top languages, and that is distributed to all the accommodation providers and is in each of those hotel locations.

What would you say to the likes of others we have taken evidence from, like Refugee Action, which has described the service provided by yourselves as, “A system fraught with delays”, or Freedom from Torture, a charity that supports asylum seekers who have been victims of torture, describing the services that you provide as “extremely variable responses from Migrant Help and sometimes cases are not even responded to for days, if not weeks”. Is their analysis something that you would agree with?

There have been challenges and there have been delays and we are very open about that. Certainly, from the KPI regime, we are paying monthly service credits if that performance has fallen short. I would say, though, that there is still a lot of misinformation about the AIRE contract and what we do. If I could just very quickly touch on the customer satisfaction surveys, we score pretty well, around 84% at the moment. We average around 1,000 responses a month, so it is a reasonable benchmark. When you delve deeper into those results of why people are unhappy with the service that we provide, none of the issues are things that we can control. It is people who are frustrated with being in a hotel for prolonged periods of time and not being moved through the system. It is people who are frustrated because their payments are not going through on time. It is people who are frustrated because they do not have an HC2 form. We can support people to log those issues and report them to where they need to go, but we do not control any of that. We are not decision makers. We are simply a reporting function and people are frustrated and often that is directed at Migrant Help because we are the reporting function. However, we cannot fix those issues. That is not the design of the contract.

Finally, the point that I want to make is the amount of money that is going to your organisation from the taxpayer has increased from £229 million to £385 million, a 41% increase. Despite all those KPIs and those challenges that I have referenced, should we be considering Migrant Help as an organisation that is fit for purpose?

I would say yes. We have a huge amount of exceptionally dedicated individuals who are working tirelessly every day to support our clients, many of whom have lived experience. We are constantly trying to evolve grow and develop. There has been significant investment from a technology perspective to make sure our systems are robust and future-proof. We are not a for-profit organisation. We do not have shareholders. Certainly, up to this point in the contract we have paid out—and we have not had the opportunity to talk about it yet so maybe we will—£2.6 million back into the sector, supporting small grassroots organisations that are really making a difference every day to our clients. We are working hard to do that. Right now in Birmingham, we have our annual sector conference where we have around 150 representatives across the voluntary and community sector. We bring them together and we are sharing best practice and providing those networking opportunities. There is so much good work happening as a result of us having the contract, so I would absolutely say that I am confident.

Can I just come in on that point? I hear what you are saying there, but do you accept that your service provision has been very variable? You say you are a referral service, but you are not doing that in some situations. People who are victims of torture are referred to you and then do not get emails back for weeks. There are cases that we have heard as we have gone around where people have found Migrant Help not to be as responsive. I am not saying you do not do good stuff, but do you accept that there has been variability in what you have provided and that with these external challenges that we were speaking about at the beginning, you have not always risen to meet the challenge that you faced?

I think there definitely have been challenges. Because we are an organisation that logs issues, that signposts, that refers, often that feedback comes from other agencies that we are not in control of. We do not have direct links in with the accommodation provider system, so if the client rings us and there has been a dispute in a property and we are asking for a welfare visit, somebody to go and support and maybe mediate in that situation, and we would not get feedback as to whether that has happened. All we can do about any issues is advise the client what timeframe they can expect a response and, if they have not had that response, they need to come back to us and we can escalate that to a complaint. It is how the system works. It might take somebody three times to ring us before there is a resolution, but because we are not in control of that issue it is challenging. Because we do not have sight of systems and processes we cannot give those updates. That is why there is frustration. One thing that I would refer you back to specifically is that on 2 June the payment rates changed. People have an Aspen card where their funds are loaded weekly. It is normally loaded in the very early hours of a Monday morning because people are living week to week with that weekly support. The rates were having their annual review. Something happened and people were not paid. They were paid later in the day, but people were expecting to be able to go to the shop first thing on a Monday morning or withdraw funds to get a bus to college, and that did not happen. We are averaging around 4,500 calls a day. On that day alone we spiked at over 12,000 because there is a problem in the system that people are then upset, concerned, frustrated about and they are going to ring us and want answers. Unfortunately, again, it is not a system that we are in control of. We will log those and we will record those. We share information with the Home Office but we have to wait for others to fix the issue.

Your argument about the variability is that it is other people’s fault, not yours?

I am absolutely not saying that and, as Caroline said, I think we have had challenges and we have reacted as robustly as we can to those. It has taken longer than we would like and we are disappointed still not to be within the KPI on the phone lines, but that is about averaging a minute answer time and we were just outside that last month at one minute four seconds. Some things are in our control and we are working hard to make sure we are delivering that service.

Do you think the KPIs are unrealistic then? Caroline O’Connor: Some of the KPIs I think are unrealistic for the scheme in which we are in and with the use of 200 hotels, for example, and not being co-located with the clients. The way the call wait time is calculated makes it more unrealistic and not representative. I also do not think they drive the right behaviours. I think it is very helpful that they are quantitative, so there is little subject to what we say about how we deliver the service—it is clear measures in time—and that is very good but, for example, a move-on appointment involves contacting the client three times. It is not about the impact on the client or the success of the move-on. ASF is five days, but if they are not co-located with us it may take longer to reach them on the phone because they are 50 miles away in a hotel that we do not have people based in and it does not speak about the quality of information they are getting before then. In light of how the system has changed over the past five years, the KPIs could be better reflective and drive better behaviour than they do at the moment.

Have you tried to renegotiate them? Caroline O’Connor: We have discussed renegotiations on some and we have recalculated some of the KPIs. It is a long, slow process and there is a lot going on in the system. The KPIs are calculated and the KPIs are deducted from our income. It is reducing our income and we are living to the contractual value in that we need to reimburse that money for not providing the service as required in some cases. So I think it is fair.

I think what you are saying is that with the KPIs and the service that you provide, the KPIs only really look at the quantitative nature of what you do rather than the qualitative nature. I think you mentioned that. I just wanted to give you an opportunity to build on what you just said. What service do you believe that you are providing that the KPIs are not recording or do not measure in any meaningful way? Caroline O’Connor: The phone line does not recognise the nature of the calls that we receive. It was envisaged as very transactional and took over the call issue reporting lines that the accommodation providers provided for themselves, and it all comes into one place. However, that is not the huge nature of the calls we see anymore. About 30,000 calls on average are issue reporting in a month. We get 80,000 to 90,000 calls, so the more serious issues, safeguarding, and domestic violence, you spend a significant amount of time on the phone supporting somebody who is facing these issues. That is lengthening our call times and has since the early days of covid. The nature of the calls is not recognised in a hard, quantitative number.

Can you describe, then, the nature of what you feel you are providing that is not recorded in the KPIs? You talked about the complexity of the problems, but what does that actually look like in practice? What KPI would you like to see that reflects the service that you are delivering? Caroline O’Connor: We provide a more holistic service. We will stay on the phone with somebody for as long as it takes.

What would the output or the outcome of that be? Caroline O’Connor: The outcome would be around the person’s wellbeing and improved wellbeing. We have one KPI that is first-time resolution on a call and we score extremely well on that. We score well on client satisfaction, resolving people’s issues with domestic violence, a referral, an exit from the relationship that they are in, an RFA to move them out of the accommodation, direct contact with the accommodation provider to help someone who is in that situation. It may be difficult to have KPIs that are nuanced enough to understand and reflect the nature of the service that we provide, but it is of critical importance to the people we support.

There are no KPIs around satisfaction, then? Sorry, I missed what you had said before about satisfaction and resolution. Caroline O’Connor: KPI 9 is the quality of service given, and that is based on the quality assurance system that Julia can speak in more detail about. That is the only quality KPI.

One specifically that I know we have been having conversations with Home Office colleagues about is KPI 8, which is around move-on. When somebody gets a decision on their asylum claim and is moving out of Home Office-supported accommodation, the measure is purely about us offering a service to them within 24 hours of being notified. That is up to three contact attempts. It is not about the output, and the output at that move-on stage is really important. Are those people linked in for onward housing? Are they linked in with the local authority? Are they linked in with DWP around any benefit claims and so on? There is no measure on that. It is literally just whether we have offered somebody a service or not.

Do you send that information to the Home Office at all?

The Home Office has the move-on information. We produce a monthly dashboard, a pack, with our contract management report. It does include all that information. It is just that we are not measured on it.

On the asylum accommodation providers, when serious issues are raised on safeguarding or urgent requests for assistance, how often do you hear that that has not been resolved and urgent assistance is not being responded to? Bearing in mind you were saying the calls are recorded, you would be able to spot a pattern, wouldn’t you?

Yes. We are a central reporting function and we have a huge amount of information that the Home Office has access to, but we do not specifically report on any provider’s contract or contract performance. The main route there would be around the fact that when somebody calls to report an issue we would log that issue. It is a KPI that we have 30 minutes to have that issue recorded and sent to the provider that is responsible for fixing that issue. The key thing for clients to understand is the next steps in the contract: if it is a boiler breakdown, what the response time is for the accommodation provider to fix that issue. Then we have to say, “If it has not been resolved in that time, you need to ring back and then we can escalate it to a complaint”. We often hear people say, "I spoke to my housing officer while I was in the accommodation" but if there is not an audit trail and a log through ourselves, then we would have to raise it as a new incident and give the accommodation provider time to fix that before we could then escalate that through into a complaint mechanism. We do log formal complaints for all the accommodation providers. We do have those stats and certainly trends around the consistent nature of those complaints as well. Yes, we do report on that.

We had the accommodation providers come in. I do not know whether you saw it. Clearsprings was highlighted as not performing well in certain aspects. How do you think it responds to you? When you are looking back at your data, if there is a big swell of Clearsprings accommodation complaints, what do you do about that?

On the complaint point, we do not personally do anything because that information goes through to the Home Office assurance team. It will be the Home Office assurance team that would use that in its contract management function.

Do you think you should?

It is not the design of the contract.

Would you like to? Caroline O’Connor: We have no contractual authority to hold people to task. The Home Office has access to our computer systems and a large analytical team that can generate reports and see patterns of behaviour. If we are concerned because we see a vast number of issues in a certain area or certain types of issues, we will raise it with the Home Office in our CMG meeting, but we have no mechanism to go to Clearsprings and say, “You need to fix this, this is a problem”. Our route is via the Home Office.

Would you say that the Home Office’s asylum team is responsive? When you have those conversations, where does that lead? Your organisation cannot actually deal with that, but you must be important to the Home Office, so if you come along and say, “Clearsprings is not performing well,” the Home Office would say what? How responsive do you think it is? Caroline O’Connor: For safeguarding issues I find them responsive. If we contact them and we raise or escalate a concern that has come to us, we get a good and robust response. We also would escalate if we have a grievous concern directly by telephone to somebody at the accommodation provider and say, “We are very concerned this is going on”. They are responsive in those cases, too.

We have a number of platforms, though. Monthly we have a joint provider board meeting that the Home Office chairs. Each of the accommodation providers and ourselves are there and that very much is an operational platform to talk about specific issues, trends, and concerns that we might have. We also have a complex case call every month with the Home Office safeguarding team where we can talk through very specific safeguarding cases or complex cases that we are all supporting that might be linked with social services. There are a number of platforms that we use. Clearsprings has a lot of hotels in its area compared to some others. I think there is more pressure in the Clearsprings estate just because of the sheer nature of where the clients are.

You quoted 337 staff on your phone lines. I get that you are speaking to very vulnerable people in very difficult situations, who often might be in hotels and they are ringing in. You are not going to be able to speed through that call. However, surely if there is that many staff and, for instance, Clearsprings, whether it has a big portfolio or not—that is down to them—it is not going well, would that not flag up? You are talking to the Home Office. All is not well. Then what happens?

We would raise issues through our contract management group meetings if they need to be raised formally. That is our monthly performance review. Then there is the quarterly strategic review management board as well. Again, there is a platform within that where we talk about relationships with accommodation providers. It is often very practical in relation to the interface that we have. As Caroline says, there is no contractual link directly in with the accommodation providers making sure there is a flow of data between them and us. We are hugely reliant on the accommodation providers. We have just talked about the KPI for brand new arrivals entering into the system and needing to do that and issue an induction within the first five days. The data that we have for the cases that we need to complete comes from the accommodation providers. We do not have any direct link around data with the Home Office and, therefore, we do need to work very closely together and in support of each other. I think we have that operational platform to do so.

Within the model that you have set up you are not responsible for pursuing or monitoring issues raised with you. Do you think there should be an advice and issue reporting service separate to you?

The way the contracts are structured is that once that issue has been reported it is then for Clearsprings, Serco or Mears to report on that. They have self-reporting contracts as well. The Home Office can certainly access our systems. It can see all the issues that would be reported to each of those accommodation providers monthly, and they would be looking to make sure that the accommodation providers are assuring that data and they are responding to those issues within the timeframes. That is how the contract is structured. Whether there may be space going forward in future iterations of the contract to do things differently is a different discussion.

Do you not think that them marking their own homework and self-reporting is not ideal? Caroline O’Connor: That is why they took issue reporting away from the accommodation providers. They used to have call centres and handle their own initial reporting. It was one of the issues when the contract was let that the volume of issues reported historically were very different to the volumes we now see. We know there is an increase in reporting. There is also an increase in the number of people within the system, so overlaid on that, but it has improved the Home Office’s awareness of the number and type of issues reported. I think that was a very useful measure to have a different organisation than the accommodation providers taking issue reports.

Just so that I am clear on this, you have a migrant who contacts you with a safeguarding issue. Do you flag that with the provider? Caroline O’Connor: Yes.

But the Home Office is monitoring it?

Yes. Caroline O’Connor: The Home Office has access to our whole system. If we raise an issue—for example, the front door will not lock—it is in the database that the Home Office can see but it will not act on it. If it is a safeguarding one, it will send information to both the Home Office and the accommodation provider’s safeguarding teams.

You do not check that that has been dealt with? It is not in your contract?

There is no monitoring once those issues have been sent.

Okay. You flag it and then the monitoring is done. You have no sight as to whether things are actually acted on?

Depending on the nature of the case, there is the monthly complex case call. If it is an ongoing case, then it often gets flagged and is added to that agenda. Certainly, from our side from a safeguarding perspective, there are a lot of actions that we take, depending on the nature. If somebody comes in, often we see them through the induction and the ASF process that may be disputing their age. We have our own processes that we would follow on that. We would understand whether they have had a full assessment at a port usually. If they had not, then we would be doing that referral to the local authority children’s services team. We would be raising a request for assistance so that the accommodation provider is aware that the client is disputing their age. Then a lot of the accommodation providers might also do their own social services referral on the back of that to make sure that they are linked in. Then the Home Office safeguarding hub is also aware of those cases. It is almost a three-pronged approach, but again we do not see exactly what the accommodation providers are doing. We often do not get updates. We do get some, but we do not often get them. It is about each party’s contractual obligations kicking in.

I want to ask some questions about some of the issues that asylum seekers raise with the accommodation providers. However, before I do I want to understand how you see your purpose. Listening to some of the answers to questions that my colleagues are asking, it sounds like you are primarily just a flagging service. Caroline O’Connor: One element of the work we do is a flagging service. The NAO report when it described our service talked about that aspect of what we do and less about the other activities we do.

How do you actually help, if that makes sense? Caroline O’Connor: On the telephone lines, for example, besides the issue reporting services that we provide, we provide support for asylum seekers, for example, who have an issue with their HC1 card and are unable to access healthcare, whose children are trying to get into school or need uniforms for school. It can be any variety of things.

You still flag them to another agency?

For those things we do, but what we also do is we support a huge amount of clients to complete their eligibility forms to be able to access Home Office support. Again, for clients who go through initial accommodation, largely the small boat arrivals, we complete on average around 4,000 applications, so that is a significant amount of time spent with those individuals to allow the Home Office to assess whether a client is eligible for full asylum support.

So that is the only thing you, I suppose, solely do by yourselves in terms of support?

There is a large number of those. There are lots of clients who may be applying for section 4 support who are not in initial accommodation. There are also cases around change of circumstances that we would complete for clients. We have an outreach service. We deliver the move-on service. That is everybody who gets a decision on their asylum claim and then needs to leave the Home Office-supported asylum world, whether that be a positive decision or a negative decision. We proactively reach out to those and we offer them all a move-on service, working closely with the new Home Office AMLO team to make sure we are complementing services.

Is the move-on service in some ways just another flagging service in that you are pointing them in the direction of other services?

It is about making sure that people understand what the next step of their journey is, so people understand the grace period. The accommodation providers would have issued a notice to quit letter when their support is coming to an end and effectively when they are going to be homeless, so it is making sure that people understand that service and what they need to do next for onward support and guidance, whether that be housing referrals, linking them in with Jobcentre Plus, or work interviews. It is making sure people are ready and prepared for the next step of their journey. Caroline O’Connor: We also have community liaison co-ordinators at the initial accommodation and they work with local charities, public libraries, community groups and churches. They connect people to the community. They set up football teams, clubs, and mother and baby activities. We have set up a library in one of the initial accommodations. I believe we are setting up a family room in another new accommodation that is opening up. There are a lot of activities outside of the contract that we undertake as well.

Thank you. I just want to find out what the most common complaints that you receive about asylum accommodation providers are. Are there any patterns with particular providers or regions or types of accommodation that get those quite specific complaints?

The most common one, interestingly, for all the accommodation providers is food provision and people who are frustrated with food. Being in a hotel and having fully catered accommodation is challenging for anybody, particularly when you have been there for long periods. I know that causes a huge amount of frustration and is again one of the real reasons for needing to get people through that system more quickly. Another one would potentially be around staff behaviour—maintenance issues not being resolved and potentially delays in issuing emergency cash payments. If the Aspen system has failed for whatever reason, maybe somebody has lost their card or it is not working or the cash machine has swallowed it, then there is a route to contact us. We will support them to request emergency support and the accommodation providers would need to issue that. It obviously needs to be issued very quickly, usually within 24 hours, if somebody has no access to funds. Occasionally, there are delays with that system.

How often do you escalate unresolved cases to the Home Office? Does that typically lead to a resolution or do you find yourself going back again?

The way the system has been built, as I say, an issue is raised. We have to allow the contractual timeframe for the resolution of that issue. Let’s say it is a boiler breakdown. The AASC providers are obliged to visit within 24 hours to see if they can complete a temporary fix and they have to provide a full fix within five working days. If it has not been fixed after that period, then we can raise that to a complaint. The accommodation providers have a five-day timeframe to acknowledge the complaint and respond to that. If it has not been done in that time, then the system automatically on day six flags an escalation through to the Home Office complaints team. They would be sighted at that point on anything that goes above and beyond that SLA.

What happens then? I suppose that would be quite a serious case where they are not meeting their contractual obligations again and again. How does that then get resolved?

That would be for the Home Office assurance teams and the service delivery teams that manage and support each accommodation provider that would pick that up as part of their monthly assurance checks and raise that as part of that contract management process.

Even if it has been flagged with you a couple of times, it is still left with the Home Office?

As Caroline says, we do not have any authority or any control over the accommodation providers. We just make sure that there is an impartial organisation that issues can be reported to, and then it is for the Home Office to manage.

Do you see any evidence of learning and improvement by accommodation providers, or the Home Office in response to the issues which you raise most often?

Through the networks and the partnerships that we have, we work closely together to identify those gaps. We have a small but perfectly formed team of community liaison co-ordinators who are doing a huge amount of work daily, weekly and monthly to fill gaps. Quite a lot of the accommodation providers have partnership managers in their regions, and we work closely to make sure that we are filling those gaps. It was challenging, certainly in winter months, when new hotels had been stood up in areas that may not have the infrastructure that certain other local authority areas have, and a lot of the clients newly arrived on small boats have very limited goods and clothing. We work closely together around a lot of added value in certain areas, making sure that people have access to warm clothes and decent shoes, and that there is meaningful activity in areas, and opportunities to access English language skills to help with the community and cohesion piece.

Serco said to this Committee in written evidence that having Migrant Help and providers as a go-between is one of the things that leads to miscommunications and inefficiencies. Serco suggested that it might be easier to get some of these issues resolved, particularly in the case of maintenance and repairs, if service users were able to go directly to the providers. Do you agree? Caroline O’Connor: I disagree. The system used to work that way, and the Home Office found that it was not very effective, so changed it. I am aware that Serco did submit a bid for the AIRE contract, and were interested in delivering the service, but could not deliver both services. There is a reason why it is set up and there is one point of contact. Our clients do find it easier to be able to contact us and raise any issue with us, and they have a lot of faith that we will pass the issue on; that we will tell them the right place to go; we will help them with their application forms; they can come into our office if they are in the IA and get some help, and they do not necessarily have the confidence in the people who are accommodating them. They are also afraid about what will happen to their asylum claim, and we hear that when people call up the helpline and say, "I don’t know if I can raise a complaint. Will it affect my claim?" and we spend time reassuring and encouraging them to raise a complaint. That is not always there if it is somebody that they see day to day, and do not see as a friend and an ally.

Has anybody ever raised concerns about your name and how you operate? You are called Migrant Help, and some people might think that you are a friendly, cuddly, NGO-type organisation, but you are actually contracted by the Home Office. Has anybody ever raised that your name might be slightly misleading? Caroline O’Connor: We have had some criticism for our name. We are also a friendly, cuddly contract provider and we try to look and do other things that we can. We run a youth welfare officer programme through third-party charities that we fund wholly. It is based in hotels—in seven locations around the UK—and it supports the mental health of 18 to 25-year-old men in the asylum system. That is funded from the surpluses of our contracts. We run a community grants programme of up to £3,000 to help run community hubs, connecting the sector events we hold quarterly. We talk about subjects like partnerships and running lived experience advisory panels. We do less of the cuddly stuff, but we certainly do the cuddly stuff, and that is one of the points of operating the contract, to help us fund the more supportive cuddly stuff.

We are supporting a lot of amazing organisations that are working in communities every day to support our clients. That is what it is about. We know that we are not the experts in everything, but think that we are in a privileged position to deliver the contract, and we want to use those funds wisely. We have our grant funds—up to £10,000 that we regularly issue to organisations. We issued £10,000 at the end of last year to an organisation in the west midlands. Their work is all about bringing communities together through food. It is a culture kitchen and it is an amazing charity. It is operating in term+ time and we have managed to fund that for 39 weeks of the year. We can support those kinds of projects but we cannot be everywhere, we cannot do everything, and we are absolutely not the experts at doing it either. The smaller charities understand their communities and where those gaps are.

One thing, very practically, at the moment, is around the journey of an asylum seeker, certainly at the start. The model as was conceived in 2019 is the right model. People need to go through an initial accommodation type environment, whether that be the established initial accommodation centres around the country or whether that is more medium or large accommodation. Either way, it is focused effort for when those individuals arrive where we can deliver our services. Health partners can be on site to support and health screen individuals; there can be focus on families around children and child immunisations; opportunities to assess and support vulnerabilities and any safeguarding risks. That model works very well in lots of parts of the country. It is, unfortunately, very limited at the moment because the capacity in those locations is about 2,500 beds, I believe. I hope we can get to the stage where individuals are going through that type of setting for a very time-limited period—six to eight weeks ideally—and then move on into more community properties where people can integrate; children can go to schools; people can be registered with GPs and so on. I would strongly advocate for their immediate needs and assessment to be made through that route. People have a much better journey, and we can do much more around education and support for individuals through that model.

That was the model and that is absolutely evident in pockets of the UK now where there is a formal initial accommodation centre. Because of the numbers in the system, and most people going through hotels, people do not go through that process now.

Local authorities play a vital role and they are the experts in their areas. When it comes to the accommodation providers procuring new accommodation and where that accommodation needs to be— often, as a consequence of the system, accommodation might be procured in an area where potentially there is no social housing. If a family gets a decision on their asylum claim, might they then be uprooted because there is no social housing in that area to support that individual going forward? Should that process be more joined up? Should there be consideration around that? There absolutely are roles for local authorities to play. They are the experts in their areas, but some of the elements that we deliver need to have that consistent approach. Chair: Thank you very much. Is there anything else you want to add before we conclude? Caroline O’Connor: I would just welcome any of you to come and visit the call centre, and visit the IA. It is really helpful to see it in context. Chair: Thank you very much. That concludes this session. Thank you for your answers. I know it has been a longer session than any of us envisaged, but you can see that we still have lots of things we want to make sure we put in our report. I very much appreciate you being here and giving us your time.       [1] Additional information provided by Migrant Help after the session: “Management Charge for the 12 months ending 31.05.25 is £6.58m. That equates to 12% of net total income, compared to the original bid %, which was circa 35%-40% of total income.”