Can I welcome our witnesses to the first public evidence session of our inquiry into asylum accommodation? In particular, we are looking at how the Home Office has managed its contractual arrangements for delivering asylum accommodation, what recommendations we might make for the break clause in the contract that is around in 2026 and how the Home Office may improve or build on its successes in managing asylum accommodation. I am very grateful to our witnesses for coming today; maybe you could introduce yourselves for the record so that we know who is here.

Hi. I am Professor Jonathan Darling. I am a professor of geography based at Durham University.

Hi, everyone. I am Lucy Mort and I am a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Hi. I am Sachin Savur. I am a researcher at the Institute for Government. We are a think-tank working to make Government more effective.

I will start with a broad question, having said that we were trying to keep things as focused as possible. I do not think that it would be unfair to say that there have been some challenges to the delivery of asylum accommodation over the years. Do you think that the Home Office has a coherent strategy and does it know how to tackle these challenges?

Yes, there have been a number of challenges, as you rightly point out. I have a little list here, but they are things that you will know, including backlog pressures and the rising costs of the system. We wrote a report last year that found that the annual cost per person has risen from £17,000 to £41,000 in just a few years. It is an overreliance on hotels that is driving that cost up. We would say that the contracts are failing, in that there is very little accountability and the procurement of accommodation is driven by cost at the expense of all else. In terms of Home Office strategy, the previous Government looked to reduce accommodation costs and clear backlogs through a mix of policies, speeding up decision making, expanding those large-scale accommodation sites and introducing things such as room sharing. The strategy has been lacking. The backlog really needs to come down. That is the biggest issue that is affecting the strategy of reducing reliance on hotels. We need to see improved caseworker workforce and training and mandatory review of refusals to make sure that we are sending the right decisions to people and that there is a bit of a triage around asylum decisions to make sure that those people who come from high‑grant countries are streamlined. The backlog is where I would start in terms of strategy.

We have seen a variety of quite short-term responses to a series of pressures. We have seen the move towards mass accommodation sites under the previous Government, which have not necessarily delivered, certainly in terms of costs but also in terms of the ability to provide the accommodation that is required here. We have seen a move since 2022 to expand dispersal. The model of full dispersal across the UK is an attempt to more widely accommodate people across multiple local authorities across the UK, but the take-up of that has been quite variable. That is partly due to ongoing tensions between the Home Office and local authorities in terms of its ability to engage with local authorities and build back trust into the dispersal system. That is one of the key messages of certainly the last decade. There has been the erosion of trust between local government and the Home Office on these questions.

We will hear from local government representatives in a future panel, but it is interesting to have that context. In some of the evidence we have heard or seen, the pandemic is cited as one of the causes of the increase in numbers. In your view, was that a real impact, or are there other things that have been there? It is difficult to say that the pandemic did not affect every part of life, but just specifically around asylum accommodation.

As you say, the pandemic increased pressures and increased arrivals. It ramped up pressure as well, but the real problem for me is a structural problem. If we are to blame those circumstantial events, we let the Home Office and others off the hook. We are saying that there was no alternative and no other outcome that could have happened. That is quite a dangerous place to be. We have to believe that the system can be improved. If we say that it was those circumstantial things that led to the crisis that we are in, we deny that.

There are a few underlying things that undermine the Home Office’s ability to respond to crises. When you think about the way in which these contracts were designed back in 2019, the Home Office did not necessarily give itself the time to more radically redesign the provision of these contracts. When you do not necessarily have that design that allows for a reaction to changing circumstances, that makes it harder. When you have a commercial team that is under-resourced, it is harder to move out of that reactive mode of thinking and into something a bit more proactive too.

Can I pick up on that point? I was struck by the evidence that the Home Office gave to the National Audit Office on the transition from COMPASS to the next contract. It only had three years in which to think about it, which strikes me as an awfully long time. Is it just in a firefighting mode? Does it not put the bandwidth into thinking through these broader issues and changes? Three years is surely long enough.

There are a few different things there. One is that the contract was extended for two years from 2017 to 2019, so it was not necessarily three years of, “We are going to plan to do this now”. The other thing is that, across Government and the public sector more generally, there has been an under-investment in commercial teams. That makes it harder for Government to secure value for money for their contracts, negotiate with suppliers effectively and understand what the cost basis is. It seems that the Home Office has improved that recently in the estimates that it is trying to give so that it can negotiate with providers appropriately. This is not necessarily just something about the Home Office. It is something across the public sector over recent years.

To go back to the point on covid, it is also worth noting that part of the pressure around covid was associated with asylum decision making and that that rate had slowed down considerably before covid as well. This is a longer-term question of a slowdown in decision making in the asylum system, which then has knock-on effects on the through-flow of people through that accommodation system. That certainly was impacted by covid, but it had a legacy before that as well.

Following on from that, there were obviously lessons that the Home Office could have learned. Professor Darling, could you comment on where it failed to learn from previous approaches to this?

One key lesson that I would foreground here, and has been the case pretty much since the emergence of COMPASS in 2012, was the real sense from local authorities that this is something that has been imposed upon them. We see this again and again, and it is written throughout the evidence of local authorities submitted to this Committee as well. There is this sense that this is something that is imposed. Even when there are apparent consultations around everything from small matters of individual procurement right through to those bigger changes in the contracting that we have just heard about, those are not necessarily being consultative. There is definitely a lesson there. The other lesson that I would suggest has not been picked up on is the importance of community engagement and consultation. Again, this is a message that we see multiple times in various different forums of evidence, but also in terms of the wider context of community tensions, in which there is not enough consideration given to community cohesion, the support infrastructures that people in the asylum system need, and how those support infrastructures map on to accommodation and potential accommodation sites.

You are saying that the support services were not necessarily in the same place as the asylum seekers were located and therefore it was very difficult for them to have access.

Yes, that has been a consistent trend. Certainly over the last 10 years there is a growing mismatch between where support services are and have been well established and where we are now seeing new dispersal and changing dispersal numbers. That has been consistent through COMPASS and the new contracts as well.

I am guessing that the large sites are particularly relevant. I was certainly struck that large is considered to be 2,000, but not 200. Depending on the location, 200 might actually be a large site. On the large sites themselves, what learnings should the Home Office have taken from those? Clearly it has said that it is not going to be using them from now on, but what learnings did it fail to have?

One consistent factor here is that large sites are not an appropriate model for accommodation for people in the asylum system. That has been an evidence point from research across Europe. We have seen a trend in other European countries towards a focus on broader sites around more camp-like infrastructure. One real strength of the UK’s dispersal model historically has been the fact that it has not gone down that route consistently. It has based accommodation on placing people in communities and offering opportunities for early integration in that way. One key lesson here is that the broader large-site model does not really work in terms of providing secure accommodation that allows opportunities for integration, the cost to the taxpayer and the messaging that this sends around sending people to former military institutions and these kinds of things. There are definitely lessons there. Also, the history of this is that the Home Office has tried this form of military institutions multiple times since the start of dispersal in 2000. We saw this in 2003 and 2004, at a point where asylum numbers were similar to today. We saw similar kinds of experiments with mass sites that were opposed by communities and often pushed back at local planning levels. Again, there is a bit of a repeating pattern here of not necessarily thinking about, “Why did these models not work previously and why would we expect them to be more effective today?”

Jonathan set out there the human cost, but there is the actual cost as well. The idea was that these large sites would save money, but the National Audit Office found that they were going to cost £46 million more over their lifetime. In terms of lessons learned, that is a key one. There is also no evidence that they deter arrivals, which was a bit of the rationale for large sites. As I say, there is no evidence for that. If anything, those kinds of sites have really symbolised and become totemic of the problems of the asylum accommodation system and become a site and a target for far‑right activity and things like that. Having those kinds of really visible accommodation sites is problematic for cohesion and integration.

We have had some evidence from the Home Office, which I think you have seen, and we have published that. It has been clear in questions to Ministers, et cetera, that there is a move away from large sites, more dispersal and the end of the use of hotels. How realistic is it that hotels will not be used?

I would argue—and I put this in the written evidence that I have submitted to the Committee—that it is politically quite dangerous to say that you will end hotels entirely. If you look through the history of dispersal since the mid-1990s, when dispersal emerged as a proposal, hotels have always been used in some form or another as a form of contingency accommodation. In that context, to say that you will completely end this produces a problem, because it means those who wish to foment tensions in the way that Lucy just described can point to one single hotel in use in the UK and say, “You haven’t done this”. It is politically quite challenging. The aspiration here should absolutely be to reduce the use of hotels and think about how those hotels have to be clearly marked in terms of standards and the quality of that accommodation. They have to be linked into support services and their use should be time-limited, absolutely. At the same time, in a context of variable demand in a constantly flexible model that is always going to have to require some flex within it, you can utilise hotels as a short-term contingency measure. That has always been the case. Local authorities did this prior to COMPASS. COMPASS had this in it and the current contracting has it in now. The key difference now, of course, is the scale of that use. That is the thing that we should be really focusing on and ensuring that, where hotels are used, they are properly appropriate in terms of the quality of that provision and the support services there. I do not think that it is realistic to say that you will completely end this, because it reduces the options that you have in addressing a really dynamic challenge.

How is the Home Office actually going to manage this contract? It has said no hotels, but you have made the point that that is going to be very difficult to deliver. It is dispersal. It has talked about student accommodation that is not being used. I cannot think of many halls of residence that are not being used by students. I think that the way it was described was that large sites are those with communal areas that large gatherings can happen in and it wants to move away from that. It ideally wants to move people into the private rented sector. This feels like, contractually, a very difficult thing to manage. How can you design a contract that allows for this to happen?

Some of this comes from the contractual obligations on certain providers, the individual providers there and the relationships that they have. It is questionable how much they really have those relationships with, for instance, local housing associations or specific landlords. This is one of the things where you can contrast the current approach with something such as the Syrian resettlement scheme, for instance, where local authorities were working with people, landlords and housing associations that they knew specifically and could therefore adapt that accommodation to meet the needs of the people who were coming to stay with them. In this approach, it is often quite a sporadic one, in that providers might be forced to scramble around to look for this kind of contingency accommodation at fairly short notice, which might not necessarily meet the needs of the people who are going to stay there. They might meet the basic contractual ones as set out in the contractual requirements and KPIs, but they might not necessarily meet the ones that lead to better outcomes for asylum seekers longer term.

Are there any lessons we can learn from other countries?

I have already mentioned one of those lessons, which is that the UK model of community-based housing and dispersal is a very positive one. We are here to think about the challenges to that model, but there are positives to it in terms of its integration potential. One of the lessons is actually to retain that kind of focus. The proposals that other people on this panel have made really speak to that, importantly. The other question internationally is around the question of distribution. Other European countries in particular have far more transparent models around distribution. In the UK, historically, we have had a process of allocating accommodation based predominantly on where there is available property. That has then been driven by housing market dynamics, to some extent by the sign-up of local authorities in the early iteration of dispersal in the 2000s and then by where private providers could procure property since 2012. This has been very much driven by that housing market and cost basis in the way that Lucy mentioned a moment ago. In that context, there is quite a lot of instability in that system. There is also a lot of unevenness in the actual distribution of dispersal. If we look at a variety of other European countries, such as Germany, Austria and Italy, each of these have different models of how they do distribution, but what they have in common is a model that is based upon a widely published and broadly transparent distribution metric, often based on population dynamics and GDP. One thing to think about in this context is how we can have a more transparent model on that. That really will matter to local authorities. Going back to the point I made earlier about trust, part of that breakdown of trust is not just imposition; it is also the sense that local authorities do not trust that they are getting a fair deal through dispersal, particularly in certain parts of the country.

We probably all have experience in our constituencies of rumours starting and people worrying that they have heard that asylum seekers are going to be housed in a certain site. There is no transparency at all. No one really knows what is going on.

Professor Darling, could you have it both ways, though? Are the weaknesses in the European model not what is now a strength, in that they can put camps where they want to? The strength of our system is that we use available accommodation where it is, but it necessarily will be piecemeal and not directed in the way the European model can utilise.

That is fair, but it does not have to be a total either/or. There are ways in which you can have a transparent distributional model that then has some flex within it to try to address those changes in availability of property and housing market dynamics and these kinds of things. I do not think that we have to be entirely fixed into either of those. The transparency of the distribution models in Germany, for instance, is that you publish that each year. It is revised and reviewed and there are bandwidths of flexibility within those to accommodate some of that flexibility. There are ways in which you could find elements of compromise in that system.

If our model is driven by where the available accommodation is, how do you incorporate that in the German system?

You have to move to where we are now, which is this model of full dispersal and trying to encourage all local authorities to be involved in that system. You look to produce a transparent distribution system and try to map across the two. I am not suggesting that that transition is going be quick or easy, but it is something that you have to at least start to think about aspirationally, particularly if we are thinking about a move to have a break in the current contract arrangements. This is an opportunity to look at how you could do that over a number of years. We have already heard about the transition between COMPASS and the current contracts taking a number of years and thinking about what those models would look like in that time. Getting asylum accommodation right is not a quick thing. Very often, and certainly for the last decade and a half, it has been focused on short‑term measures and priorities. This Committee and where we are right now is a real opportunity to think about the longer-term building of a more stable system. That requires a bit of that longer-term strategic vision and thinking about this as a transition over a number of years, rather than a short-term shift between those models. In that context, there is time to think about how you map on those different approaches.

I agree with the premise of the question. We are spending so much money on hotels and accommodation—over £3 billion a year—when that money could be invested in real and sustainable, as you say, housing solutions. Instead of putting people in hotels, which are manifestly unsuitable, as we have described already, they could be housed in stable, well-managed homes in communities where they are able to integrate better into the local community, access local services and get the integration support and networks that they need to rebuild their lives. There are models out there that show that, if there was investment in a capital subsidy fund, that would allow local authorities and housing associations, in partnership, to purchase and renovate accommodation and use that in the short and medium term for asylum accommodation. At the same time, that would be upping and adding to the local authority housing stock, which could then be used for wider groups that require it for temporary accommodation, so you are adding value. The investment is still there, but it is an added value rather than a huge cost.

It is £3 billion a year on hotels.

Dr Mort, the IPPR said in its evidence that the current system for distribution is incoherent and opaque. Could you expand on that? How could the Home Office make it less incoherent and opaque?

I believe that there is interest, in particular, in the indexing tool, and I have had a little look into that. The indexing tool, ostensibly, is meant to be a more transparent and data-driven approach, although it is slightly that in name and not in reality. There are some fundamental issues in the design and operation of that indexing tool, mostly that, while there has been consultation, I think, throughout the process, it has not been finalised. I do not think that everyone buys into and understands how that indexing tool works, why these variables are used and how they are weighted. It all feels a little unclear. The datasets that are available to local authorities and their partners, strategic migration partnerships for instance, are quite fragmented. You cannot get the master data sheet that tells you, “This is why this place gets this number of asylum seekers and this is why this place gets this number”. It is very unclear. As a result, as Jonathan was saying earlier, people and councils, quite rightly, feel that this has been imposed on them, rather than something that has been co-designed that they are buying into and where they can understand why these decisions are being made. It is almost like the working out does not add up.

To assist us in the recommendations that we are going to make, what are the key factors that should be considered about where to distribute, how the distribution should work and which accommodation to place asylum seekers in? What is your view in terms of the balance between equality of distribution and cost? Clearly, it is often cheaper to go to certain places, but that might not be fair on the local area.

There are a few things there and it speaks to what Paul was talking about earlier. Cost should not be the only consideration in thinking about where to place people, especially if we are concerned about cohesion, integration and communities getting along. Cost cannot be the only overriding factor. Still, disproportionately, places that have historically housed more asylum seekers, which are typically poorer places, continue to do that. The pattern remains the same. There has to be a model that allows us to look beyond cost. At the same time, it is really important to think about dispersal and distribution and not reduce it to a numbers game: “Does this place have the right number compared to this place?” It has to be about making sure that people are accommodated in places that can support them. Coming back to the point about cohesion and integration, it allows them to rebuild their lives and contribute to their communities. Otherwise, you can imagine the sorts of things we might see if we do not consider that. Then the factors that you have to consider are things such as population size, but also infrastructure. Does it have the GPs, school places, English language provision and community networks that people can tap into? Does it, importantly, have the legal aid infrastructure? If not, how are we going to make sure that it does? The other factors that are really important are that there has to be meaningful engagement. There has to be buy-in from local authorities and local communities, and genuine consultation. Of course, there has to be a look at the impacts on local services and taking that into account as well.

I agree with all the factors that Lucy noted there, but I would add consideration of dispersal accommodation alongside other aspects of refugee resettlement. Dispersal is not isolated from those wider other UK resettlement schemes, so VPRS and, to some extent, Afghan and Ukrainian resettlement as well. That should be factored in and considered. We may come to this later, but one consideration here should also be move-on services and opportunities for move-on—if people receive refugee status, where are those move-on opportunities?—and ensuring that there is a consistent through-flow into that process as well.

If someone has a positive decision, they would not be expected to stay in the temporary accommodation that they have been put in, even if it is a beautiful, nice, purpose-built home that they could live in for a long time. This is something where they need to move on and go on to a different form of accommodation.

That is certainly the model as it currently stands and I would envisage, going forward, that that would still be the case. There have been, historically, cases where local authorities, when previously in charge of asylum accommodation, were able to do that; they were able to retain an individual in a property and, in essence, change the badging of that property, which gave local authorities a bit of flexibility under previous arrangements. It might be worth looking at and considering that, and potentially asking local authorities about it in their evidence. At scale, that is unlikely to be the case. That is more a flexibility for individual cases, rather than a wider response to move‑on challenges.

Moving on to, specifically, engagement and communication, how would you recommend the Home Office go about communicating? Let’s be clear: not many communities will go, “Yippee doo!” if they are told that some asylum seekers are coming to their local area. How can the Home Office communicate in an open and transparent way with local authorities and the wider community around this?

There are two questions here, to some extent. One is about communication in the asylum system and with local authorities. That has to be an ongoing dialogue. The Home Office has articulated in its evidence to this Committee that it does this regularly through a variety of different mechanisms. The evidence from local authorities potentially contradicts that at times and it is worth thinking about where those tensions are coming from. An obvious place for that would be strategic migration partnerships and ensuring that they are consistent in their work and role across the country. If we are looking to reform the asylum accommodation system, strategic migration partnerships are going to have to be fundamental to that. One of their roles has to be to be consistent in the way that they are playing that mediating role across the country. I would argue that they also need to be consistent in including a wide variety of different voices in that communication, not simply the Home Office and local authorities, but also third-sector organisations and those with lived experience in the asylum system. That is one key thing. That has to be about communicating with local authorities about where accommodation is procured, transparency in the system and all the things we talked about previously. In terms of actual community engagement, though, there are two things that are really important. One is that there is a requirement to think more carefully and in a longer-term pattern about how you build in integration opportunities at local level. Local authorities are the experts in doing that. They have that local context and knowledge, but they also need support to do that. One thing that has happened, certainly since COMPASS and, I would argue, since the current contracts as well, has been a stripping away of local authorities’ capacity to do some of that work. They often feel that they are, in essence, being asked to do some of these things without being resourced to do them. The second question is about messaging or communication at a general level from the Home Office, in the sense that there is no clear, consistent or coherent communication about what the dispersal system in Britain is seeking to do from the Home Office centrally across the country. That lack of messaging around what we are trying to do here, beyond end hotel use, is really important. There needs to be a clear communication strategy about what dispersal means, and the responsibilities that the state has to people in the asylum system around accommodation and the expectations on that across the country. We have not seen that at all in the last few years and that is a real lack, particularly when you compare that with the messaging on things like the Homes for Ukraine scheme, or, to some extent, the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme from Syria. There really needs to be central messaging as well as localised responses.

This question of communication really highlights the flaws of the centralised system that we have. Of course the Home Office cannot go out and consult all stakeholders, every local authority, the voluntary community groups and the local community in that area, but who can do that and is well placed to do that? It is our local authorities and other regional partners, which I am sure we will get on to. That is why decentralising and giving power to regional and local bodies on this is so important, because they can do that communication and understand what their communities need better. Private providers may well communicate up to a point, but I do not think they have the same incentive to communicate with the number of stakeholders that we have outlined.

The Homes for Ukraine and Syrian refugee schemes were done with a Minister with specific responsibility, who was a joint local government and Home Office Minister. It was Lord Harrington in both cases, although he was not Lord Harrington for the Syrian refugees, but he was by the time it came to Ukrainian refugees. Is that a model that could be looked at, with that joint responsibility of the two Departments?

Looking at that model, it seems like that was quite key to a lot of the success there. It meant that local authorities felt particularly well consulted. You could see that quite a lot, particularly in terms of the Homes for Ukraine scheme. You do not necessarily need to have a Minister doing that, but a lot of our research finds that, if you want to do cross-Government co-ordination in that way, there needs to be quite a strong ministerial angle. Whether you have a joint Minister across two Departments spearheading that or the Home Secretary or a junior Home Office Minister working with counterparts in MHCLG, but not in a formal joint capacity, is a different question.

The other difference with those two schemes was that the public were very positive about that. Particularly the Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed into communities, whereas, in the case of the asylum accommodation contracts, it is seen as being a very negative thing within the community. Is there anything the Home Office could do differently to change perceptions on this?

I would argue that this comes back to the point I made around needing clear and consistent messaging at a national level around strategically what you are hoping to achieve through this system and, secondly, around how this maps on to a set of international obligations to people in the asylum system. Thirdly, I do not think it is surprising that that sense of tension and concern around asylum accommodation in different communities has emerged in a context where asylum dispersal has been badged as a question of burdens for the last 20 years consistently. Within the press, but also politically, it has been talked about as a burden. Asylum, certainly under the last Government, was associated more with the language of illegality, rather than the legal right to seek asylum in the country. When you start to produce that kind of messaging consistently, that produces a context in which it is not going to be seen as a positive for asylum accommodation to be in your community. It starts being a question of burdens rather than responsibilities or opportunities in that sense. There needs to be a real reset around that frame of language and consideration.

On that point of burdens and the idea of integration and addressing the whole accommodation issue by the state providing something, is there a role for lifting the ban on asylum seekers working?

I would argue absolutely yes, for two key reasons. First, there is no particularly strong economic argument for retaining that ban on working. Fundamentally, this is an opportunity to benefit from a range of skills and the integration opportunities that brings, particularly in a context where we have recognition rates of asylum of, I think, 52% last year and 72% the year before. In that context, many of those people will go on to receive refugee status and remain in the country. The second reason why lifting the ban on working is important is because it potentially has a strong impact on move-on opportunities as well. If you cannot work while you are in the asylum system, there is no opportunity for anyone to build up any finance to potentially pay rent or a deposit on a property when you then receive refugee status. There are many other challenges with move-on, but that is one that really factors in and that a series of homelessness charities talk about as a real impediment and barrier to that opportunity. For integration questions, but also for some of that move-on question, there is a case for the right to work, certainly.

I know that in previous submissions and responses you have raised concerns about the Home Office’s approach to the procurement and management of the asylum accommodation and services contract. Do you mind expanding a little on those concerns? Why do you think that it has been poorly performing, from the concerns that have been raised so far?

The question is about how the Home Office has managed the contracts and concerns around that. There are a number of things. I am sure that both my fellow witnesses will have things to pick up on as well, but there are a few things that I would point out. The contract is lacking, in that the key performance indicators are very few. The statement of requirements is very long, but, of the actual things that are measured, there are nine KPIs and they mostly revolve around just getting to a minimum standard in the accommodation itself within a set timeframe. We found through our research that that tends to lead to a culture of quick fixes, getting things right and patching things up, rather than fundamentally providing good-quality accommodation. There is another thing that is really missing from those KPIs. There are probably lots more, but one important thing is around safeguarding. There is a real oversight in the contracts in terms of looking out for the safeguarding of people within the system. The other thing is that, even where there are KPIs and a provider has not complied with those, penalties are rarely enforced. They have the power to apply service credits to providers, but they are rarely used, if ever. They are regularly waived and it leads to this sense that the providers are immune to any kind of enforcement from the Home Office. The other thing to mention is that the inspection model is so fragmented and incoherent. There are multiple ways that inspections happen but they are not joined up at all, so the providers do their own and the Home Office does its own, but its capacity has reduced massively. Local authorities may do their inspections when they become aware of concerns when they are flagged, but that is almost firefighting, rather than looking at it from a preventive approach. Then there is the ICIBI, which does brilliant inspections but has a massive remit and cannot possibly be a substitute for a proper inspection system.

If you would not mind, expand a little on the KPIs that you mentioned or the measurables that are associated. If you were to suggest a different approach or different KPIs that should be looked at, what would they be?

The very first one would be something around safeguarding and, where concerns have been raised, how they have been managed and making sure that they are factored into the contract management of providers. I would not want to comment more on that.

The other thing is about how these KPIs are designed. A lot of them are quite process-driven. For instance, there is a KPI around move-in services. That might be about orienting the person waiting for an asylum decision about what is available in their local area and how they can access different services, but the thing that is measured is this act being delivered, rather than the actual outcome. If you had a KPI that measured the outcome, for instance, of the retention of knowledge by someone seeking asylum, you have a better measure of what the Government actually want to happen. We find that, a lot of the time in Government contracts, if you measure the output instead, that can lead to gaming and potentially the Government not necessarily achieving the outcomes that they want.

Jonathan, was there anything that you wanted to add, or do you disagree with any of the points that have been made?

No, I do not disagree. One thing that I would add is around the monitoring of accommodation standards and complaints processes and the way in which, under this current series of contracts, that monitoring and complaints process is shifted from a previous arrangement in which that was internal to providers to now being organised by an external provider on a separate contract, in essence, which is Migrant Help. That has been a real challenge in terms of Migrant Help’s capacity to do that, given that it is also running the nationwide support service and helpline, in essence, for the asylum system. That dual role has been really challenging and something certainly worth looking at in terms of the feeding through of issues from that process into inspections and other areas of complaint and response.

Maybe these answers will encompass what you have said already, but are there any angles that you feel the Home Office should be exploring in terms of key considerations, as we look to the contracts ending in 2029 or the break clause that has been utilised in 2026, that you have not mentioned already, linked to considerations that it absolutely should be looking at with existing operations on the ground?

The key consideration should be about moving away from private providers and bringing this area back into public hands. I do not think that the outsourcing experiment has worked. All of us have reams of reports showing the problems of the system. Giving power to regional and local bodies to take the lead in procuring and managing asylum accommodation and support would pay dividends and I think we would see improvements. It is quite a radical departure from the current system and therefore we also need to tread slightly carefully and go for a bit of a pilot and pathfinder approach to make sure that we are doing it right. There is an opportunity coming up. There is a contract break clause in 2026 that would be a good opportunity to roll out some pathfinder models in willing regions and local authority areas, giving the power to regional bodies in the first instance, which would then procure and commission services from a range of organisations. It could be local authorities, if they are willing and able. It could be others. It could be voluntary community sector organisations. It could be private providers. There is some flexibility in the decentralised system that we are recommending, but we need to ensure that evaluation, learning and support are given so that, by the time 2029 rolls around, other regions and local authorities in the country are ready and able to pick up that task. It is not something that everyone wants and is able to do right now—I understand that.

Do our other witnesses disagree with what Lucy has said so far? Is there a different approach?

One thing to bear in mind when it comes to these contracts is that they are very large. There is not necessarily that much competition. There were very few bidders when they were put up for tender in 2019. That means that it is harder to do enforcement and penalties. One reason why there have not been service credits is because the Home Office cannot necessarily look to another large-scale supplier to provide accommodation for an entire region. One benefit of delivering this at more of a local level is that you are able to have more competition because there are more potential providers that might be able to provide accommodation at that level.

You could argue that one of the risks of that more decentralised model is a fragmentation and fracturing across multiple different models across the country. In some ways, the centralisation of those three big contracts was intended in part to address that and to try to have more uniform provisioning. That model has really not worked, partly because you have seen massive chains of subcontracting within that, so actually that fragmentation is already there. It is already baked in to the current model that we have. Prioritising local authorities, on the one hand, is where the expertise and knowledge is. Secondly, it is where, if you are going to resource things, that resource has the potential to have a wider social impact in the way that the question earlier about housing picked up on. The resources there are about a wider collective community resource, rather than simply going to a private provider. That sense of fragmentation is a risk, but one that is built into the current system as well, to be honest.

Again, this may be just expanding on what you have already said. How do you feel that the oversight of the performance of the contracts should be looked at within this period up until the break clause has been potentially instigated or the end of contracts in 2029?

Penalties should be imposed where they are warranted, where providers are not meeting their contractual obligations. The Home Office should use the powers that it has at its disposal to make sure of that.

I want to pick up on a couple of things you said, particularly around safeguarding. Could I explore that a little further with you? In your view, how effective are the current contracts, if at all, in ensuring the safeguarding of the residents in this accommodation?

In the research that we did for our report last year, we spoke with around 30 people seeking asylum who had experience living in asylum accommodation. They raised a number of concerns, as did the wider stakeholders we spoke to, and they are quite varied. What comes to mind first is around the threat from far-right harassment and violence, which has escalated in recent years. We have already spoken about why that is, because of the symbols that hotels and large sites hold. Hope not Hate found that there has been a 102% increase in incidents outside asylum accommodation in a one-year period. In the riots last year, in some places asylum accommodation was targeted. That is a real threat. It is a safeguarding threat. People are really fearing for their lives. That needs to be addressed throughout any sort of reform of the system. Coming down to the more individual level, there are real concerns about young people and minors, unaccompanied young people and people who are age-disputed being placed in adult accommodation. One of the people who we spoke to in our research was forced to share with a young person. That made them feel uncomfortable and was concerning for everyone involved. There were no safeguards in place to protect that young person or the adult who was sharing that room with them. One of the striking things from our research was the impact of asylum accommodation on women. There were some really horrendous stories that women shared with us about living in mixed gender and poorly supervised accommodation, or in accommodation where the people there who have been subcontracted and are meant to support you, the staff, are also a threat, maybe entering your room without permission. The threat could be the people who you are living with, but it could also be the people who are there who are meant to protect you. Women talked about being really scared of using shared bathrooms, limiting their water intake so that they would not have to go to the toilet and the knock-on effects of that on their physical and mental health. In terms of children and the hotel accommodation that young people are staying in, there is very little privacy and few places for them to be children. There are real concerns around control and surveillance and coercion. People spoke about facing harassment, assaults, threat and intimidation. Safeguarding is a really big issue in the current system. It is proliferated and can go unchecked because of the complicated subcontracted system that we have. There is not a lot of oversight. It gets really complicated to look after people’s safety in that context. There are some murky waters about who should be in control of safeguarding. Should it be the local authority? Should it be the Home Office? That means people slip through the nets as well.

Is there anything that can be done within the current system, as it is just now, to improve safeguarding? What changes in process could happen to improve the welfare of asylum seekers?

I already mentioned that there could be a contract change to include KPIs around safeguarding. That could happen now. It does not need to wait until contract changes.

Can I just pick that up? Are there any KPIs relating to the welfare or safeguarding of residents?

Not as far as I understand, no.

There are none at all.

No.

There are no minimum standards. We are talking about a very vulnerable group of people. It is not just about their safeguarding; it is about safeguarding the community as a whole. Any considerations of safeguarding are completely absent, as far as you are concerned.

It is in the statement of requirements, but it is not in the key performance indicators. We have recommended other things in our report as well, including enhanced vulnerability assessments at the beginning. We need to be making sure that people end up in the right places, that they are not in Wethersfield and that they are not in hotels or mixed-gender accommodation that cannot meet their needs and is going to put them potentially in harm’s way. There was a court judgment this week that three people were unlawfully placed at Wethersfield. We need to see better assessments to prevent that happening in the future. There needs to be better training for accommodation staff. That has to include subcontracted staff as well. It is not good enough for it just to be Serco, Clearsprings or Muir Group. It needs to be the many companies underneath them as well.

I just want your feedback on something that I came across last week. In my constituency, there is an accommodation hotel. I was there. It houses about 100 single men from across the usual countries that we are seeing at the moment. There is one welfare officer who is in charge of safeguarding the welfare for these 100 men, the vast majority of whom cannot speak English, and one person from 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday, who is responsible for their healthcare and everything in regard to the residents’ welfare. Is that standard practice within asylum accommodation?

I am not sure, but what you have said does not surprise me.

Do you have anything to add on welfare or safeguarding?

On the point about the lack of provisioning in that context, I do not know the details of that particular case, but my suspicion would be that, where there is support for those people in that hotel, it will come from community organisations or from charities and NGOs that are not funded to do that work. Again, this comes back to the wider point. The funding for this is going to private contracting rather than the organisations that are doing the work of going into hotels and providing support and expertise. This is something we have seen since 2012. We have seen a move away from allocating support and funding to support organisations that have the expertise in working with people in the asylum system and their vulnerabilities. If you strip that away, people do not stop going to those services because they still need them—they still need that expertise—but there is no capacity to retain them. You are shifting the challenge in that sense.

To pick up on the point about the lack of KPIs on safeguarding, one of the things the Home Office did in response to criticism was set out a framework for safeguarding, which specified the responsibilities for the Home Office and for contracted providers. One of the only downsides to this is, if you do not have robust contract management and if these sites are not inspected on a regular basis, you cannot necessarily enforce that framework and check it is being put in place. At least within the scope of the current set-up, more could be done in terms of contract managers and safeguarding teams in the Home Office working together to set out exactly what good looks like when it comes to safeguarding in line with that framework, if you do not amend the contract just yet.

How can we square maintaining or enforcing these standards on safeguarding with the decentralised approach? How does the chief inspector perform that function under a decentralised approach where those responsibilities are more diffuse? Are there contradictions in those two aspects of what you are calling for?

It is definitely a challenge. Picking up on what Jonathan was saying earlier, it is already very diffuse. There are huge variations in safeguarding, training and vetting from site to site. This would not necessarily be a change from the current system. There are a few different layers of responsibility that you could put in place. This could sit at the level of local authorities. The GMCA has already spoken about how it has the capacity to do property inspections, for instance. The other thing is that the Home Office could still retain a role in terms of sharing best practice around procurement and contract management with local authorities. Even if the Home Office is not delivering this accommodation directly themselves, it could still have oversight and do intelligence-led inspections. Jonathan mentioned that the Migrant Help helpline does not always work that well. If you could have a more effective source of intelligence across the country and do targeted inspections in that way from a Home Office central oversight level, it could be possible to do these things. Realistically, you have to consider that there is massive variation already. Decentralisation would not necessarily lead to that much more variation.

We talk about this point in our report. If you are decentralising, you need some kind of independent—we need this anyway—inspection framework. There are a couple of other things to mention. The ICIBI does wonderful work in this area. It does not have access, I understand, to all the contracts it needs to effectively scrutinise how well this is happening. That needs to happen. The other thing is that there are best practice models that could be drawn on. The Care Quality Commission uses quality statements to show what good looks like in any particular area in an inspection. That has the effect of driving up standards. You know what you are aiming for rather than what the floor is—the bare minimum that we will accept. There are other models that are more transparent, which involve sharing best practice or publishing findings. That is not what is happening at the minute. It is all very piecemeal and sporadic. Whether it is now or in a decentralised system, there does need to be a more cohesive approach, which could look to other models to learn lessons.

I have one last question, if I may. Do you see any political issues in local authorities being seen to build purpose-built accommodation for asylum seekers while still putting non-asylum-seeking homeless people in hotels? Do you see that being an issue that would fall into the trap set by hard-right organisations?

Yes. Evidently, that is something that would need to be carefully managed. There is a way to do this that emphasises that this is about a whole-system approach and that the current system is harming communities. This new approach would allow for asylum seekers to be accommodated while that backlog is cleared, but those properties would also be useful for the wider community. Yes, I take the point. It is something that would need to be carefully managed.

Just very quickly on that point, there are examples from other European contexts, the Netherlands in particular, where part of the means of addressing some of that question is around experimenting with options of co-housing, so you have purpose-built accommodation that is not solely for asylum but for a variety of other groups. That has to be very carefully managed and handled, but it does address some of those questions. It has the additional benefit of potentially offering opportunities for community engagement and integration at an early stage. There are models out there to look at and experiment with. It does not have to be a solely either/or approach.

I just wanted to turn briefly, if I may, to the transition from asylum accommodation to dispersal accommodation, if they are granted asylum. Does the Home Office provide enough support for that transition? What does good look like? Where would you like to see more support from the Home Office?

Do you mean in terms of refugee move-on in particular?

I mean when they move on from asylum accommodation after they have been granted refugee status.

There are a number of things to highlight here. First, we have already mentioned the right to work as something that would potentially have a positive effect there in the longer term in terms of giving people an opportunity to go into housing. Another factor is a need, in essence, to do more earlier in the asylum process to communicate people’s rights, entitlements, responsibilities and potential, if they receive status. As a collective, we have been in this evidence quite critical of private providers. To be fair, in their written evidence to this Committee, Serco does highlight that it is experimenting with providing some of that training earlier in its process. That is something to be supported in terms of thinking about those rights and entitlements. That also has to map on to the Home Office engaging further with local authorities to communicate and inform them about what their responsibilities are and the way in which dispersal has a set of knock-on effects for those responsibilities going forward, particularly in a context where with full dispersal now we are seeing new parts of the country coming into dispersal without that prior experience and potentially then having a knock-on effect in six, nine or 12 months’ time on refugee homelessness. That question is really important. Again, that is where something like strategic migration partnerships could be important in terms of conveying key responsibilities and information between local authorities with more and less experience of this. The final thing I would highlight is the need to have a greater sense of planning further in advance from the Home Office to local authorities around prospective decision making, the pace of that decision making, when that decision making is anticipated and these kinds of things. One of the things that has certainly fallen away in the last decade has been that level of foresight and communication between the two. In 2023, Glasgow city council declared a housing emergency because of the flow of asylum decision making rapidly being pushed through the system to address the backlog, leading to a really significant crisis of housing in the city. By contrast, in some of the work that I have done previously—I can share this with the Committee, if it is of interest—I have looked at how under previous arrangements Glasgow talked about how its agreements with the Scottish Government and the Home Office gave it foresight on that decision making so it could begin to plan homelessness provision much more consistently and map those two things on. It is never going to be perfect, but there certainly could be a much more consistent model. That combination of factors needs to be considered in move-on. The other thing to note very quickly is the move to e-visas, which we have seen at the moment, being the mechanism through which people then have access to things such as universal credit and so on. That transition has been patchy and uneven. It is improving. Certainly, there is evidence from the No Accommodation Network and Homeless Link that that is improving over time, but it is not always being consistently picked up by banks and other service providers that e-visas are the mechanism into mainstream entitlements.

I have one final question. What is the top priority? If we want to reduce homelessness among the refugee community, how best would you go about that? What could the Home Office do? Should they take on more responsibility for integration when they are given that status?

There are some things that we point to in our report. Some things have changed since our report. The 56-day move-on period has been introduced. I believe it is a pilot. Seeing that being sustained would be really good. That has been really welcomed by people supporting refugee move-on. If well resourced, the asylum move-on liaison officers that have been introduced could also provide really meaningful support. We also need to see a staggered approach, picking up on Jonathan’s point, to decision making so there are not these localised housing crises or homelessness crises. Having that staggered approach and making sure that that is really well communicated ahead of time and co-ordinated with local authorities is really important.

I do not know whether the Home Office is necessarily the best place to deliver integration. It is not necessarily one of its strengths. Potentially, those services are better delivered at a local authority level or a strategic migration partnership level. The role for the Home Office there is about what data it can provide. It has various tools at the moment to let local areas know how many people are seeking asylum there and who might be served a discontinuation notice, but it seems as though there are still a few friction points and local authorities are not necessarily always able to access the data they need. If the Home Office can share data about the profile and the demographics of people who are likely to be getting an asylum decision in the coming weeks, that is something that the local authorities can use to think about what services they might need to deliver in terms of the connections with employment support or what kind of accommodation might be needed, for instance.

In terms of the practical timeframe, if we are going to have this different approach, how practical is it to do it in short order?

It is imperative that it happens, whether it is practical or not. It needs to happen. There are opportunities for it to happen. There is a break clause, as we have mentioned, coming up. With resources, co-ordination and partnership working with local authorities and strategic migration partnerships, et cetera, I have no doubt that a new system that functions much more effectively could be delivered. We will all know we have failed if we come to 2029 and we feel like we are coasting into another version of AASC and AIRE.

What should the Home Office be doing today?

They should be looking really seriously at the recommendation to decentralise and starting to identify the regions where they might pilot that. That would be the No. 1 thing I would recommend.

Part of the issue with the end of COMPASS was that we got to a point where, in effect, we sleep-walked into the next set of arrangements. There was not a really serious consideration of alternatives. It felt like path determinacy. We really need to do something different this time. This model is not working. It manifestly has failed. Now is the time to look for alternative models. The other thing that the Home Office should be doing is thinking about ending all forms of mass accommodation. We have talked about this as an aspiration, but it certainly should be prioritising that moving forward. On that transition question, to reiterate an earlier point, this is about a longer-term systemic change. These are structural failings that have been part of this system for a long time. They will not be solved quickly, but you have to start somewhere. Finally, if you look through the history of dispersal, those transition points—I mean the transition points into dispersal, into private contracting in 2012 and into the new contractual arrangements—have been the points of most pressure and instability for providers, the Home Office and, really importantly, the people who are accommodated. That is where you see real spikes in terms of the emotional pressure of being moved and the instability of housing accommodation conditions. We need to make sure that any transition, however staggered it may be across a number of years, is communicated clearly to stakeholders and has the lived experience of those in the system at its heart—basically, caring about that lived experience. I really do not think that has been the case under previous transitions that we have seen.

The Home Office should learn lessons from elsewhere and what it has done before. It is not as if every single instance of asylum accommodation has been done poorly in the past. Lucy spoke a bit about asylum move-on liaison officers. That was a lesson learnt from Afghan resettlement. There are so many things to be learned from Homes for Ukraine and the evaluation of the vulnerable persons resettlement scheme in terms of how these things can be delivered at a local level. Even though there is not necessarily that much time until the break clauses and until the contracts are up, there is a lot for the Home Office to draw on and robust evaluation that it can draw on as well. If it does that, it might be able to design an effective service.

On that point, are you aware of last week’s case where Suella Braverman was found to have been in breach of her duties under the Asylum Act? Are you aware of that case? There was a case last week where, as Home Secretary, she was in breach of her duties. Does the Home Office, from your experience, learn how to address issues from such legal losses?

It is an interesting question. From the research we have done at the Institute for Government, it seems like evaluation and evidence is not always done that well in the Home Office. There are always pockets of where things are done well. Partly because asylum and immigration are quite politically salient issues, the fusion of politics and evidence can favour the politics a little too much, potentially.

I would agree. The history of dispersal is one where those political considerations have often overridden questions around care and support for people in the asylum system. Often this has been a politicised question. Partly that is why having structural reform of this system has been so hard. You focus on short-term models or issues such as housing market dynamics and these kinds of things rather than thinking, “What is this system for?” Fundamentally, it should be for providing secure, dignified accommodation to people who are vulnerable while they are in the asylum system and then thinking about the move‑on opportunities beyond that. It becomes part of these quite short-term political questions, which hinders the ability to do the structural change that is required.

There is just one other point that I wanted to make on that question of what the Home Office should do. I have spoken a lot about the need to decentralise and empower others to do the job, but the thing that the Home Office is, can and should be doing that is so critical is working on that backlog. The only way that trust, partnership working and buy-in from local authorities will happen is if we see those numbers coming down. That is better, of course, for the people who are stuck in that system as well. They need clarity about what their future holds. Tackling that is a really important role for them.

Thank you to all three of you. I had hoped to finish before 3.45 pm. We are just a minute after that. Apologies for keeping you a little bit longer than we expected, but thank you for your evidence. We will now move on to the next panel.   Examination of witness Witness: David Bolt.

We now move on to our second panellist. Doing the panel alone is David Bolt, the interim chief inspector of borders and immigration. David, do you want to say a couple of words of introduction?

Yes. I am very grateful for this opportunity to appear before the Committee as part of this inquiry, but more generally I would like to make the point that the Committee is a really important stakeholder for the ICIBI. It is one of the few ways in which the ICIBI’s findings can be amplified and one of the few bodies that can hold the Home Office to account for its performance against our recommendations. When I was in this job before, I did not do very well in terms of having a relationship with the Committee. My successor created a very robust relationship. My recommendation to my successor will be that he works very hard to make sure this relationship works well.

No.

I do not think anybody does, frankly. The Department has recognised that it needs to put more effort into having staff who can do this. It tells me, in response to some of the recommendations, that there are now 51 staff who are going through a Cabinet Office-endorsed programme for training in relation to contract management, but this is not a new thing. As the Committee will know, I was in post between 2015 and 2021. In 2015, I looked at the contracts for ticketing, return flights and escorting. That was on the back of an NAO report that said the Home Office was doing extremely badly in managing its contracts. In 2015, it committed to ensuring that it would have staff in place that could manage large contracts. Clearly, if it did manage to do that at any point, it did not manage to retain them. That is the problem that it has had consistently in terms of contract management. It buys in staff with the relevant skills, but it does not manage to hold on to them and it does not train its own staff to have those skills. As I say, it is now committing to doing that, but how long that will take I am not sure.

Yes. This goes to your question about whether it has staff with the appropriate skills, but, beyond that, in terms of the way in which the contracts are constructed, the asylum accommodation contracts are largely based on self-reporting from the providers in terms of performance and meeting the KPIs. The Home Office does not really have, in terms of either capacity or capability, sufficient resource to check whether or not those self-reports are accurate. You heard from the previous panel on service credits and whether the sanctions that apply within contracts, when things are not being delivered, are being used. I am told by the Home Office that there has been a much greater use of service credits over the last six months or so. I have not had the opportunity to inspect or see the evidence for that.

In the report that the inspectorate produced a few months ago, I drew attention to the fact that I made a recommendation in 2018 and my successor made a recommendation in 2021 about the Home Office’s regime for checking on service providers in terms of the contract delivery. I said that the team was too small and its approach was not systematic. It simply was not capable of functioning as an efficient and effective process for checking up on how the service providers were performing. I made recommendations about strengthening that team in 2018. Those were accepted but never actually done. My successor made recommendations that envisaged an intelligence-led system in which the Home Office team would do quarterly reviews of the asylum accommodation. That was never done. There was some suggestion that in 2024 the Home Office had begun to do some of that, but, when we looked at it, we were not convinced that it was being done either in the way we had recommended previously or to a standard that would provide really any real reassurance.

Like I say, when I was here before and when my successor was in post, the ICIBI made specific recommendations about strengthening the team that provides oversight to the reporting from the service providers. I reiterated those recommendations in the most recent report. That is what needs to be done. The team needs to be strengthened. It needs to be able to truly hold the service providers to account.

In 2017, this Committee made a recommendation that the responsibility for inspecting properties should be passed from the Home Office to local authorities. If that were done, the ICIBI could then provide perhaps an annual stock-take, taking on board what was found by the local authority inspections and pulling that together as an ICIBI inspection report. Unfortunately, the Home Office rejected that recommendation in 2017. I went on to conduct an inspection in 2018 without the help of that local authority input. The inspectorate can and has done quite a lot of inspecting of asylum accommodation. This folder is all the inspections that we have done since 2018; I brought it in case you asked any detailed questions that I did not have in my head. We have done a lot of inspecting. I do not think we can provide assurance. Inspection and assurance are two different functions. If you are looking for assurance, that has to be built into the executive function. It is part of management. Inspecting can look at issues or look for evidence of what is going on, but we cannot provide assurance. Apart from anything else, the inspectorate simply is not large enough to be able to do that on a continuous basis.

I am not going to say no to that, am I? Yes, of course. A lot has been said in the past about the size of the ICIBI. We are 30. We were 30 when I started in 2015. We are still 30. The budget is £2 million, which is a drop in the ocean for the Home Office. Compared with other inspectorates, the prisons inspectorate is twice that size. I am not sure how many times that size the HMICFRS is, but it is several times that size. When the NAO looked at it in 2014, they drew attention to the fact that the ICIBI was under-resourced. Yes, I would welcome more staff. I do not think it is very likely at the moment.

You will have seen that both I and my successor reported on that in annual reports, but the Home Office has refused to provide access to parts of commercial contracts. Some parts of commercial contracts are publicly available, but they have refused to provide some of the other parts on the basis they are commercially sensitive. I was invited to accept to see those parts of those contracts, when I was doing this before, on the basis that I could not then refer to them in inspections. I refused to go along with that on the basis that I thought that that would compromise my independence. On that basis, I do not see them. There is an issue about whether there could be an amendment to the legislation that sets up the inspectorate to include the ability to redact information that was commercially sensitive. That might unlock some of that in terms of being able to see those bits of information as part of an inspection and being able to report them in an inspection report that would go to the Secretary of State while still allowing those parts to be redacted if they were in the published report. There may be a way through it, but at the moment there is not.

No. Again, the report covers that in quite a bit of detail. The Home Office and the contractors do not really have an integrated system. When I was doing this job before, in the last couple of years the answer to any criticism that I made about information and data was Atlas. The Atlas system would fix everything. That is most definitely not the case. In the instance of asylum accommodation, Atlas does not provide the sort of management or other information that is necessary to manage the estate effectively.

There are a number of things. The thing that is probably the most concerning is around the issue of safeguarding. Information is not really being properly collected and shared with the Home Office in relation to safeguarding. That makes it very difficult for the Home Office to have an approach to decisions about what is appropriate accommodation for certain cohorts of people because it does not really have any feedback loop in relation to what is happening to people going into asylum accommodation who are then having difficulty in that accommodation.

No. There is a more fundamental problem. In 2018, I did an inspection that looked at safeguarding, and how the Home Office identified and responded to adults where there were vulnerabilities. That identified some significant issues. The conclusion that I reached was that this was not something that was best left to the Home Office to sort out for itself. It needed to reach out to other agencies and others with more experience of dealing with vulnerable individuals and safeguarding issues and learn from that. You heard from the earlier panel that there are others with much more experience and a much better understanding of these things.

No. This was a 2018 report into vulnerable adults.

No, not much. It is still the case that the Home Office is struggling to articulate its own understanding of safeguarding. The recommendation from 2018 still stands. It needs to reach out to people who understand these things much better and not try to invent it for itself.

Certainly not in hotels, no. That is something that essentially rests with whoever is managing each of the locations. As I explained, the information flow back into the Home Office around that does not work. In the large sites, there is a different arrangement in terms of who is on site. Therefore, the Home Office has a better ability to understand some of the safeguarding issues at first hand because its own staff are on those sites. I come back to my earlier point: I am not sure that the Home Office is the best organisation to be considering safeguarding issues. It needs to learn and understand those with the help of others.

Oh dear. What are my biggest concerns? There are lots of different concerns. Let us take the large sites first. I know—we heard this from the earlier panel—a lot of people have the view that large sites cannot be made to work at all. At the moment, however, there are large sites. There is a real issue on those sites. There is a question about providing the people there with meaningful things to do to occupy their time. You have large numbers of young men. If they are unoccupied, idle or have no purposeful activity, there is a risk of frustration and disorder. There is a whole series of problems that might flow from that. Those are touched on in the reports and, in particular, in the letters annexed to the report that my predecessor sent to Ministers at the back end of 2023 and early 2024, which drew specific attention to the need to consider those questions about purposeful activity. The other thing—this is not just large sites; this applies to the whole population—is the question about uncertainty. People do not know where they stand with their asylum claim or how long it is going to take for them to get any answer to their claim. They have no sense of how long they are going to be in the accommodation and no sense of what their future might hold. The lack of communication with asylum seekers about what is going on with their claim is something I drew attention to some years ago. As I was leaving the post in 2021, I highlighted the importance of ensuring that there is communication and that people can ask what is happening. They ask that question regularly, particularly in the large sites or the hotels. They are asking these questions of the people with whom they are engaging. Those people do not know the answer. It is a real source of frustration that people do not know. In the report, you will have read about the real contrast that exists here. Napier Barracks in Folkestone was brought online at the back end of 2020. I went down there in early 2021. It is a fairly desperate place. People were feeling like their mental health and wellbeing was being affected. There was some disorder at that time because they did not know what was happening to them. It was more complicated because there was covid and all sorts of other sorts of restrictions, but they just did not know. I went there again in July. The men there now know they cannot be there for more than 90 days. They have a degree of certainty about their future. I sat around with a group of about 20 of them. They were quite jolly; they were quite happy. Some of them knew to the day when they were going to be moving. Contrast that with Wethersfield—I also went there in July—or the Bibby Stockholm. There were people there who could not recall how long they had been there. They had no sense of time. That was obviously affecting their mental health and wellbeing. As I say, there are lots of concerns, but those are some of them.

It is a mixed picture. If we take the most recent inspection, the 2024 one, there has not been much progress since then, or at least nothing where I have been able to see and test the evidence. The Home Office tells me there are things in progress in relation to most of the recommendations, but I have not seen very much that is concrete. In the past, if I reflect not just on asylum accommodation but more generally, I counted something like 414 recommendations in the six years I did this between 2015 and 2021. About three-quarters of them were accepted fully. Most of the rest were partially accepted and about 20 were outright rejected. In 2016 I introduced re-inspections, which involved going back and looking at whether in fact recommendations had been implemented. It was frequently the case that, although things had been accepted, they had not been implemented, the implementation was incredibly slow or it was not quite what was recommended. There is a real question about the Home Office’s implementation of recommendations. It is not unique to the ICIBI. There are recommendations made by the NAO and internal audit; there are reviews that make recommendations. They are not singling me out and only not implementing the recommendations of the ICIBI, but it is an issue about follow-through. It has something to do with the capacity of the Department to deal with all its business all of the time to the right standard. It is such a wide remit and there is quite a lot of turnover at senior levels. Corporate memory is not great; corporate record-keeping is terrible. Sometimes there is complete commitment to do something but then no follow‑through. As the Committee will know, the Home Office is often in crisis over something. When some crisis comes along, something else it was doing has to fall away. That is what sometimes happens with some of the recommendations.

I want to pick up on the point around strategic leadership at the Home Office. You may have covered some of the points already, but I want to highlight the issues around leadership to start with. Do you think that the Home Office had a clear vision and strategy when it came to asylum accommodation?

No, I do not. I used the word “crisis” before. It was dealing with something that was a crisis, was it not? The numbers were going up dramatically. It was trying to find a way of managing that. At one point, the answer seemed to be large sites and that was the direction it was going in. That was sort of the direction the Prime Minister at the time was taking it in 2022. It has now changed direction from large sites to small and medium sites. I am not entirely sure what exactly that means but that is the shift, and it is a shift away, as far as possible, from hotels, although the permanent under-secretary has indicated that that is not going to happen for a number of years. It still does not really have a strategy. Perhaps I should caveat that. I am not entirely clear what its strategy is. If it has one, it has not articulated it in a way that I have been able to understand it.

Using my words, there is still an unclear strategy associated with the current Administration in terms of asylum accommodation. What impact do you think having no clear strategy to deal with asylum accommodation is having today?

It is going to have an impact on the question that this Committee is looking at, which is around the break clause in the current contract and what any future provision might look like. In terms of the planning for whether or not that break clause is going to be exercised and what different direction asylum accommodation might go in, not having a clear strategy is obviously going to have an impact. It goes to that other question that the Committee was discussing with the previous panel, which is around stakeholder engagement—the way in which it engages with local authorities and others—around what the requirement might be for accommodation in particular locations. If there is not that absolute clarity, then it is difficult to have those conversations. It is certainly difficult to have them early enough to be able to take onboard all the issues that those discussions ought to cover.

Do you feel there has been any change in approach or any influence through the change of senior leadership within the Home Office that has specifically been dealing with asylum accommodation? Has there been a change in strategy or any positive influence that has happened as a result of change in personnel?

I am not sure that I can comment on that with any real clarity because, as an inspectorate, we are not able to constantly engage over a particular topic. I have had some conversations with the Home Office about some of the changes it has made, but we have not really inspected it and it is too early for me to be able to say whether or not it is going to make any big difference. Generally speaking, I am not sure that structural change is the answer to many of the issues.

Is the Home Office being open enough with you, in terms of giving you in your role the information that you need if you ever request it?

With a caveat around commercially sensitive information, generally, yes. If I ask a question, the Home Office tries to give me an answer. The answer is not always very clear, but I can ask whatever I need.

What in your view are the key lessons that should be learned from the previous Government’s approach to asylum accommodation? You have touched on it, but I want to delve into that a little deeper.

You will have seen that in the foreword to the report I pulled out a few particular issues. That question about engaging with stakeholders is a really important one. This is not anything new. Back in 2018, I reported on the importance of trying to ensure that that relationship, particularly between the Home Office and local authorities, was one where there was some trust between the parties. This Committee, the predecessor Committee, drew attention to the fact that actually what was happening was that trust was being eroded. The situation was getting worse. In drawing attention to it again in 2024, I was not saying anything new. It is really important to engage openly and honestly with local authorities at the earliest possible point. There was quite a lot of ground to catch up, because of the mistrust. I will come back to that in a moment, if I may. There are a lot of people who are critical of the Home Office, who are stakeholders as well. There are a lot of NGOs on which asylum seekers are entirely reliant for all sorts of support. They have criticisms of the Home Office and the way the Home Office is delivering on its responsibilities. The fact that they are critical does not mean that they should not also be properly engaged with by the Home Office. There is a real piece there for the Home Office to do, in terms of stakeholder engagement. Coming back to local authorities, my predecessor set up a forum. We have a number of forums for stakeholder engagement. He set up one for the strategic migration partnerships and I had a meeting of that forum at the end of February. They all attended bar one—one region was not able to make it. They told me that, despite the fact that the Home Office had created a whole set of new posts for engagement with local authorities and engaging around asylum accommodation, it was still the case that, in one instance, they had been given 24 hours’ notice of the opening of a hotel. They were also concerned about not getting sufficient notice about closures of hotels. There were still quite a lot of issues. If the Department cannot get those relationships right, where you have strategic migration partnerships that are routinely engaged with by the Home Office over a whole range of things, it is going to struggle to get some of the other relationships right.

There have been issues identified and possible lessons that have been identified to be learned. How confident are you in your role that the Home Office will actually adhere to those lessons, mistakes and changes that are to be learned from previous Administrations? What level of confidence do you have in a directional shift within the Home Office to address this issue?

A lot of the issues for the Department are really systemic, long-running, underlying issues. A lot of those issues have been identified over a very long period. That does not give me a great deal of confidence in the Department’s ability to take on board those lessons and actually make change.

I want to finish off on stakeholder engagement, because you mentioned that as well. Again, these are my words, but you mentioned that it had been done not as well as it could be done and, indeed, poorly in some aspects. Where do you feel, if there have been any improvements at all, that stakeholder engagement has improved with different local authorities and wider stakeholders that are representing those who are going through the system? Expand on the level of engagement you are experiencing or seeing from the Department.

As I say, since the inspection, I have not, other than through the meeting that I mentioned with the strategic migration partnership members, sought to check on how those relationships have progressed. I can only reflect on what we saw during the inspection and what I saw in the time that I was doing this job before. Typically, in the evidence that we saw, engagement was too late and it was one-way. I bring this out in the report. It was telling rather than listening. That was what many of the parties felt. The Home Office was not actually listening to what they were telling it. It was one-way communication.

Finally, then, what does the Home Office need to do to regain that trust?

It is not going to be easy to do that. Coming back to your earlier point, having a clearly articulated strategy that it would then share with those people who would be affected by that strategy, and then engaging on a much more detailed level, in terms of listening to what the issues are and responding to those issues at a local level, would be a way to do it. There is a wider issue. I can take it outside just asylum accommodation. The Department is not very good at being transparent about its plans and intentions. That lack of transparency is where suspicion comes. Often, we find, as the ICIBI, that inspection reports tend to get longer and longer, but a lot of that is just setting out things so that people can understand what is going on. The Department could actually make that information readily available itself, if it had a more transparent approach.

You have done quite a few inspections, I would imagine, in your time. What is your greatest systemic concern or challenge that you have seen across all those inspections on the quality of the asylum accommodation and the contracts?

In answer to your question, I did 81 inspections when I was here before and probably about five or six since I have been back, with a few more in the pipeline. We have done eight asylum accommodation inspections, most of which my predecessor was responsible for. The issues that I have already mentioned are the ones that come out for me most strongly from the inspections that we have done into asylum accommodation. There is the engagement with the providers, the proper supervision of the delivery of the contract. That has been problematic from the beginning and continues to be. The local engagement, the local authority engagement and proper engagement with the NGOs providing vital support to asylum seekers outside any of the contracts is really important. Communication with the asylum seekers themselves, so that they know what is going on, is really important.

What is the impact of that on the residents within the asylum accommodation?

We talked earlier about this. People claiming asylum by definition are vulnerable. Some have additional vulnerabilities, because of the experiences that they have undergone. They clearly need support and care. They need to feel some degree of agency—that they have some degree of control over what is happening to them. That is something I am not sure the Home Office properly understands. If it does, it does not really do enough to try to help people. The length of time now that it is taking for asylum decisions to be made is another added problem.

Turning to safeguarding specifically, this is something that you have already raised. Do you think that there are adequate systems in place to ensure the safeguarding of these individuals?

No. It really starts at the first point of engagement. The Home Office has a suitability test that it applies to people who are going into the large sites. The inspection found that clearly people were being judged to be suitable and then found later not to be. There was some question mark about whether that suitability test of itself was the right test, but also whether it was being applied in an appropriate way. If people were found later not to be suitable, what learning was there from that, in terms of feedback and reconsideration? There is that issue. Then, for those people who are going into hotel accommodation, it is really left up to the service provider to make the judgment about whether or not someone is showing signs of vulnerability, mental health issues, wellbeing issues, concerns that would mean that they might need to be moved from that accommodation they are in to some other, more suitable accommodation. Again, here, as we discussed earlier, the Home Office is not as connected to those sorts of decisions as it needs to be.

What do you think are the practical implications, then, of the lack of robust process within safeguarding?

For the individuals, there is increased risk. There will be individuals who are not receiving the support that they need to receive. That is the greatest concern: that there will be people who may be feeling suicidal or experiencing other trauma and are not receiving support. A lot of them do get some of that support, but from NGOs and others that are providing it outwith the system, as it were.

How would we improve those systems?

Again, I come back to the point I made earlier, which is that I am not sure it is really the Home Office’s business. Leaving that with the Home Office is not really going to work.

Who should do that?

The NGOs and those people who have much more knowledge and experience of dealing with people who have suffered trauma and are vulnerable should be leading on that, but they should be doing it in a more integrated way with the Home Office, so the Home Office is actually learning and not creating some of the issues from the outset. That comes back to the question of communication and relationships, and making sure that those relationships are strong. There is a risk at the moment that there is a gap there, because the Home Office does not engage very effectively and there is suspicion about what its intentions and plans are.

Have you met the Home Secretary directly to discuss the issues?

Yes. We also discussed the question of the asylum backlog, which I think is relevant, and needing to make decisions at pace. The Home Secretary is concerned about whether or not that means there is a risk to the quality of those decisions. When I came back, it was for six months. The six months was then extended by another four months and has just been extended again by another three months. They are getting shorter, but I keep getting extended. We agreed in that first period that it would not be appropriate for me to look at asylum casework and some of the consequences around asylum casework, because a new Government would have a new approach. Moving into the new business year, the inspectorate will want to now look at asylum casework, particularly looking at that bit of asylum casework that butts up against appeals and why it is that so many cases are going to appeal.

Notwithstanding the fact your contract has been extended by another three months, it is my role to offer you the chance to give a valedictory, although you have taken that opportunity throughout today’s very interesting set of answers. Ultimately, you have been chief inspector for six years over the last decade. What is your view of the Home Office role in immigration and borders? Is it the right body in which it should be situated?

It is coming up for seven years, actually. Like I said, part of the problem is the sheer scale of things and the complexity. The Department, as I said before, really struggles to have the capacity and the capabilities that are required to manage all those things consistently well at the same time. You will have crises and priorities, and they will drag attention, resource and effort in a particular direction. Then something else falls out of sight. That is how you end up with backlogs and issues that then themselves suddenly become something that you cannot ignore for any longer. Then the shift is towards that. Capacity and capability are issues. That does raise some questions about whether or not the Department is too big and its responsibilities too wide. What would you do about that? It is not for me to comment, but it is a question. Can the Department actually manage all those things to the level that it needs to?

Is the mindset right? Should migration, for instance, be in Business?

Some aspects do require input from other Departments. When it comes to things like visa policy, clearly there are other interests. This is not something that I have looked at in great detail, but the Department does engage with those other interests. There is the MAC now that provides some advice on some of those sorts of issues.

Finally, I agree with you that vastly more resources are unlikely to come the way of the ICIBI. Given that reality, do you think there is an opportunity to change the remit or powers to make what the ICIBI does more efficient?

I mentioned that there might need to be some tweaks to the legislation in relation to commercially sensitive information and the way in which that might be managed. It is a difficult balance to strike. I am not a regulator. I am an inspector. I cannot force the Department to do anything. I can only make recommendations. It is really important that those recommendations are evidence-based, that the Home Office can have trust in the evidence that is presented by the inspectorate and that the recommendations flow directly from that. There has been a lot of discussion, I know, about the ability to publish reports. I have never sought that. There is a strength in the current arrangement, whereby the report is laid at the same time as the response to the recommendations. If you dislocate those two things, as is often the case with other inspectorates and other bodies, it becomes more difficult to understand where those recommendations came from and whether the response is adequately responding to the findings of the overall inspection. However, the Department has to do much better in sticking to the eight weeks than it has ever done in the past. If there was a more defined requirement about it having to publish within eight weeks, that might be helpful. Generally, there is always going to be a tension between the inspectorate and the Department, because we are going to find things that it is not going to want to hear. They always get reported—sometimes with redactions, but they go into reports. It is a tricky relationship.

Thank you very much for your time this afternoon. It has been very informative and really will help us in the work that we are doing. That concludes today’s session.