Welcome to our Committee hearing today. This is part of our ongoing inquiry on the contractual arrangements that the Home Office has to provide asylum accommodation. We are interested in how the contracts work for both clients and those who are affected more widely, including local authorities that we will be speaking to in the next evidence session. The Committee has undertaken some work visiting some locations. We will be careful not to say where we have been or to mention specific locations so that we look at this in a general sense. I also want to welcome Will Forster, who is here guesting from the Housing and Local Government Committee. You are welcome. It is good to see you here. Perhaps I can ask the witnesses to introduce themselves and then we will move on to the questions.

Hi. I am Megan Smith. I am a solicitor from the law firm Deighton Pierce Glynn, where we have a specialist public law and civil liberties practice.

Hello. I am Alex Fraser. I am the UK director for refugee support and restoring family links at the British Red Cross.

Hi. I am Enver Solomon. I am the chief executive of the Refugee Council. We are the largest single provider, working with around about 15,000 people in the asylum and refugee system across England.

Thank you. We will start our questions, and we will start with Jake Richards.

Yes, sure. There are a number of challenges. We have three central concerns. One is poor quality accommodation across the estate, including in hotels. The standards the Home Office and its contractors need to comply with are relatively low. I can get into the detail of that if that is helpful, but we continue to see across the estate those standards not being complied with. The second is the failure to protect particularly vulnerable asylum seekers. Examples of that include small children and newborn babies who are in hotels for months, sometimes years—I have seen cases of two years—in overcrowded rooms. The third is the failure to monitor the performance of contractors, which I know the Committee is very much alive to. Many of the cases that we see could have been avoided if the contracts were being monitored properly. That includes the performance of the subcontractors that run the hotels. In relation to hotels, we see a real variety of issues with the quality. We see disrepair issues and failure to provide adequate and nutritious food, particularly for children. We also see forced room sharing of survivors of torture and trafficking. I can go into detail on those if you wish, but maybe I will let the panellists give their overview.

I am here from the British Red Cross, an independent humanitarian organisation, part of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement. We support about 40,000 people a year throughout the whole arc of the asylum journey. Over the last few years, we have seen an exponential rise in the demand for the services that we provide. A lot of the issues that our caseworkers support people with are in relation to accommodation. In the last 12 months, our casework team has completed something like 30,000 actions just on accommodation. It has always been challenging, but certainly we have seen the situation become more challenging with the increased use of hotels and other large-scale sites over the last few years. They often tend to be located outside community settings. That has been further compounded by Operation Maximise a couple of years ago, with the expansion of room sharing, particularly room sharing with strangers, and the change to the accommodation allocation policy last year. All these factors have combined. It is a challenging moment for anybody supporting people in the asylum system. One thing that is important for me today is to perhaps step back slightly and remind ourselves who the people in the asylum system are. We are talking about people who experience some of the most difficult, dangerous places in the world. They have experienced some of the worst trauma that any human being could experience. The people we support have experienced torture, sexual and gender-based violence, domestic abuse and trafficking. They are often separated from their loved ones, isolated, fearful and not certain of what the future holds. That for us is why this matters so much. That is why we are here today and have submitted evidence to this Committee. We are grateful for the opportunity. When we speak to people generally, most people want what any of us want—to live in safety and dignity. We find that often difficult. Yes, we certainly have examples of good practice and people who respond to the concerns raised either by people living in the different forms of asylum accommodation or by our caseworkers. However, often we do not find that, and we find inadequate responses to the situations that people are living in—often inadequate because of material things like mould, infestation, leaks and so on, but more around the feeling of safety, particularly for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, survivors of domestic abuse, people who have been trafficked and age-disputed children. We are particularly concerned about those people and their experiences in the system. We have two reasons why we carry out so many actions in relation to supporting those people. The first is the current process of initial screening and vulnerability assessments from day one. That needs to be improved, and I am sure we will come on to that later on. A lot of this is also rooted in practice, experience, culture and trust. A lot of people disclose to us later in their asylum journey because they have high levels of trust with us. The challenge we often find is that when we are trying to get a response to whatever the issue is—whether we think someone has been moved into inadequate accommodation, or because of some material issue with a leaking roof—those people often are not taken seriously. People often tell us about a culture of disbelief. Often we have to advocate and work quite hard to get responses. If we have a good, long-standing relationship with housing officers and accommodation providers, that is often a much more effective process. Where we do not, where we rely on email inboxes and so on, often we get no response at all. That is a bit of an overview as we see things.

I would endorse comments by both Alex and Megan. Look, the current system does not work in three ways, briefly. It does not provide value for money for the taxpayer. It does not work for local communities and councils. As we have been hearing, it does not work for those in the system itself, the people seeking asylum. In terms of value for money, the Committee will be aware of the cost. We are talking about billions of pounds of public money here being wasted on a system that, frankly, is dysfunctional and highly inefficient. If you look at the amount of money that goes from the contractors—for example, Clearsprings—to the middlemen who then procure accommodation, they are creaming off huge profits. That has been exposed in media articles and in evidence that the Committee will be aware of. It is a grossly inefficient system. The terms of reference from the Treasury for the work by the Office for Value for Money on temporary accommodation, which includes accommodation for asylum, recognise that. The Government acknowledge that. For local authorities and local communities, the system is currently designed to allow a private contractor like Serco to move into an area and fundamentally distort and disrupt the local housing market. It is utterly dysfunctional in how it does that because it can purchase private accommodation on the private market and push up costs. It has disastrous consequences for the local housing market and is frustrating for local councils. Also, their purchasing of accommodation in particular in poorer areas or poorer wards within council areas creates huge resentment, fuels massive resentment, and builds community tensions. We saw the worst of that play out in the riots last summer. Finally, for people seeking asylum, we have heard lots of evidence around that, but I would say one fundamental thing around safeguarding. At the moment, the safeguarding risks, roles and responsibilities are still woefully misunderstood by the providers, Clearsprings, Mears and Serco, and are not effectively understood and dispensed by the Home Office. That fuels poor decision making when it comes to fundamental decisions about individuals who are facing serious safeguarding risks.

It is a mixed picture. We tend to find perhaps more concern in hotel accommodation than we do in the community-based accommodation. In fact, our view is that accommodation should be rooted in communities for a range of reasons. We find some of the issues that people face, particularly in hotels on the outskirts of towns and on the side of motorways and so on, can be quite problematic. I remember fairly recently sitting in on one of our drop-ins. I will not give the location, but in the space of a couple of hours I met a range of people who had come in to our drop-in and who were living in one of those hotels. I met a group of Syrians who came to get support from our team. They had been living in this hotel for something like two months, but they had not realised a whole range of important things about what was happening next, where they could get support from and how they could raise concerns if they had them. The reason I mentioned that is because one of the people among this group of Syrians was a 17-year-old child. They were taking this young person under their wing, but at no point up to then had anyone done anything else about it. Of course, we then took appropriate action and so on. That gives an example of how sometimes those hotel settings are out of sight. I suppose that would be more of a concern for us, and it is more difficult for organisations to have a presence there and go in to see what is going on and help people. A bit like at the start of the asylum journey, there needs to be much more robust initial screening and vulnerability assessment. There also needs to be a much better, clearer, transparent process of inspection and monitoring of all locations—not just one or two, but all locations. Given those vulnerabilities that I spoke about earlier that people in this room will be aware of, that oversight and accountability is critical. When I met with some of our caseworkers, I spoke to them about this, and they said that it is almost like the accountability fizzles out when it gets down to that last mile. It is not clear how that accountability works. Often at a local level you can get two versions. You can often have a great relationship and good localised action, or you can get the opposite of that. The question is: where is the accountability? Where is the scrutiny? Where is the monitoring? That will drive up performance, because it is possible. We do see examples where accommodation settings are run well, and they will notify someone of a concern and get a welfare officer to go out and do an assessment. But we do not always get that. I suppose that is the question: how do you ensure a much higher level of consistency in practice, not just great guidance and policy? It has to be demonstrated in practice and be monitored and assessed.

I endorse that. There is huge variability. I particularly draw your attention to HMOs, which are used by the private contractors— poor-quality accommodation that they know they can use for the purposes of the contract, and that landlords are struggling to rent. This is a gift to Rachmanite landlords, in effect. The lack of inspection oversight is also a real issue here, and the lack of resource capability in the Home Office to exercise that. I will draw one critical comparison here. The CQC was appointed by the Home Office to inspect accommodation provided to survivors of modern slavery who were supported under the modern slavery victim care contract. There is no equivalent for asylum accommodation contracts, and there should be, because some poor-quality accommodation is impacting on individuals’ mental health, wellbeing and physical health. Do not forget the plight of unaccompanied children, some of whom are older teenagers. They are often put into what is called supported accommodation, but effectively they have to fend for themselves without adequate support. We know that is an issue for British teenagers in the care system, but it is doubly challenging if you have come here as an unaccompanied child.

In response to your question about how easy or difficult it is for individuals to challenge, it is exceptionally difficult, in our experience, particularly if individuals do not have support from frontline organisations, which are exceptionally stretched on the ground, or legal aid solicitors, which are also unfortunately quite few and far between in the current landscape. There are various issues. One is a lack of information and communication, so most of our clients do not know how they should raise issues. They often do not know that they should contact Migrant Help, or whether they should go to hotel staff. Then there is also a lack of communication around who to go to with what issues. There is a real range of issues, as we have heard: safeguarding, disrepair, and inadequate accommodation generally like room sharing. It is unclear to our clients who to go to for what, and there is often circular communication. Take safeguarding, for example. A client we have supported facing racially motivated harassment would go to Migrant Help. Migrant Help would say, “We can’t help; go to the accommodation provider. Go to the safeguarding mechanism at the accommodation provider. You need go to your housing officer. You need to speak to the Home Office”. This takes weeks and months, sometimes, for people in seriously inadequate accommodation that is having a detrimental impact on their mental and physical health. When we get involved at the litigation stage, all our clients—either themselves, but mostly with frontline organisations—have contacted Migrant Help, hotel staff, their accommodation provider and sometimes the Home Office through escalation routes, but nothing is done until we send a pre-action letter or perhaps even start judicial review proceedings. We have acted for hundreds of asylum seekers in this situation over the past year alone, and in the vast majority of cases the issues are resolved following the pre-action letter or litigation, or a court order.

They are resolved, yes. Very few cases go to a full legal hearing.

Yes, exactly. That, to us, is not an effective system and it is certainly not an effective use of public funds, particularly when huge sums are already being spent on the accommodation system. I would like to stress that we are only able to assist a proportion of asylum seekers. I imagine there are huge numbers of individuals who are stuck in inadequate accommodation, and that is worsened by the fact that there is inadequate monitoring. There is no visibility of them and no way for them to access the adequate accommodation that they are entitled to.

I want to drill down a little bit more on the detail of how some of the accommodation providers are delivering on the requirements within their contracts, or how they may have indicated they should be delivering on them. I will ask this question of you all. In written evidence that we have received, accommodation providers have told us that they have been going above and beyond in terms of meeting their requirements. Is that your experience?

We work with accommodation providers in different parts of the country, and I think it is very variable. For example, without identifying a particular region, in some of the hotels in one region the provider has individuals in that hotel who are effectively the welfare manager for sometimes hundreds of people—dozens and dozens of individuals in that hotel. Some welfare managers will go above and beyond. Indeed, we have some staff at the Refugee Council who have worked as welfare managers who have then got jobs with us. Others will not and will literally sit there and see it as their job to push back and not go the extra mile. As we have heard, trying to get additional support from Migrant Help—especially due to the lack of face-to-face casework support, because it is a telephone helpline—is extremely difficult. I do not think accommodation providers are consistently going above and beyond. There are some very hardworking individuals in the system who seek to do that, but in our experience that is not the consistent practice.

Do you know what the expectation is on an accommodation provider to provide? The reference to us, as a Committee, is that some have been going above and beyond, but above and beyond what?

They are not there to provide casework support. They are very clear; they are basic accommodation providers to make sure that the accommodation is essentially safe. They are not there to take on additional detailed casework advice and support. That is not their role. Some will help. If I am an individual and I go to the welfare manager, if I do not understand a letter that has come from the Home Office, some welfare managers will seek to advise or they will refer to Refugee Council staff who might be working in the accommodation. There is also a big issue—this was identified by the Borders Inspector—about the safeguarding requirements in the contract, which I do not think are clear enough and I do not think set out the right requirements around safeguarding. Then there are issues around accountability in contract compliance, too. I will pass over to Alex.

Our experience is very similar to what Enver has set out. It is very varied, a mixed picture. We have examples of stuff that you cannot quite believe is happening, and you have examples of other stuff where you are like, “Wow, that is brilliant”. However, you should not have a system with those two extremes in it. A lot of this goes back to the inspection regime, the monitoring, and perhaps looking at what those minimum standards are. Of course, minimum standards should be being met, but maybe those minimum standards need to be raised, maybe the bar needs to be raised up. We do see such a mixed picture. I know it is very demoralising for those people who are putting their heart and soul and time into improving situations, going above and beyond, when not everyone is doing that. Often the voice you will hear about is where things are bad, and rightly so, because that is what you need to drive up and improve. That is where we have our major worries and concerns, and that is where we will focus. To give an example of where we saw someone going above and beyond—I am sure we will come on to speak a little bit more about age-disputed children—there was one accommodation provider, someone who took it upon themselves to work with the voluntary sector, work with statutory organisations and work with the local authority to provide a much more age-appropriate space within a particular hotel. That was real initiative, and I am sure that has made a big difference to those people. The question is: why can we not replicate that? That should be the norm, not the exception. It is how you replicate and perhaps reward those things that go well above and beyond. Our experience is varied. As you saw in our written submission, we have lots of examples of stuff that, frankly, beggars belief in terms of the experience. I can talk about some of those here now if helpful, but it is written in our evidence, of course.

That is kind; thank you.

Identifying a vulnerable individual, assessing what they need and then referring to relevant statutory and voluntary agencies is what the providers are meant to be doing under accommodation contracts. They have an obligation to identify individuals who have specific needs and who are at risk, and they are defined in the contract. A significant concern we have—I know other NGOs that we work with also do—is that the hotel staff on the ground do not have sufficient training or experience to be able to do that. Sometimes it seems that the Home Office is expecting hotel staff to be able to identify an individual who is at risk of modern slavery. But in the context of forced room sharing, for example, if an individual has a positive reasonable grounds decision through the NRM, so there are reasonable grounds to conclude that they are a victim of trafficking, they should be automatically excluded from room sharing. We know from the cases that we have seen that individuals have presented their reasonable grounds decision, exposing themselves as a vulnerable person to hotel staff who they do not know, and then been told, “Sorry, you need a GP letter”. That is not a criticism of the individual hotel staff; it is a criticism of the system and the lack of adequate training and safeguarding in place in hotels.

All three of you have highlighted the variances that exist, whether it be geographically or between different accommodation providers. There seems to almost be a bit of a discrepancy, certainly from the evidence that has come to the Committee and our own experiences through visits—a variation on the expectations from accommodation providers, whether it is about housing or what additional support they should provide. Looking at contract renewal, what would your recommendations be? Should it change, or should more emphasis be put on those accommodation providers providing that additional support?

We would argue that private contractors are not the right contractors to be providing accommodation, care and support to a very vulnerable group of individuals. Local authorities are already doing it for a whole range of different groups, including victims of domestic violence, prison leavers and families who are in priority need facing homelessness. A much more effective system is to join up provision of accommodation and support to achieve economies of scale and to avoid the situation that we have at the moment where Whitehall is effectively competing with itself for access to housing and associated support for a number of different vulnerable groups. I do not think the contracts are fit for purpose, I do not think they deliver value for money and I do not think they are the most effective way to meet the accommodation or support needs of this group.

To build on that, there are several things that seem important to me and to our organisation. One that is often absent is how you include the voice of the people who are living in the system in the onward design of it. That would help a great deal in what good would look like in terms of safe, dignified accommodation that delivers what people need and care about while they are in the system. It is also thinking about whoever is delivering the contract, because someone has to deliver it. There has to be, as we have already said, a much more clear, transparent and rigorous inspection regime, whoever is delivering it, to agree standards that are transparent so everyone understands what is expected. It is also critical that when it is falling short action is taken. Some of the things that I spoke about right at the start that have happened, which I think have compounded the issues, we need to see some of those things change as well. I suppose that is the link between policy and whoever is delivering the contract—things like Operation Maximise and having people sharing rooms with strangers, particularly where they have recognised vulnerabilities. Around the use of large-scale sites, our belief is that accommodation should be rooted as far as possible within communities.

I agree with all that. We are supportive of the suggestion of moving it into more local authority accommodation, given all the issues that we have seen with the delivery of accommodation to date. It is important to emphasise that that is not a magic solution that would make a lot of these problems go away. A lot of the problems are also within the Home Office: failure to adequately assess vulnerabilities and needs, failure to pass that information on to whoever is providing the accommodation, and then failure to monitor. That would all still need to happen, given that it is the Secretary of State’s duty under legislation to ensure that she is providing adequate accommodation in every individual case.

This is where I think the Office for Value for Money review on how you can provide sustainable funding for temporary accommodation for a range of groups, including asylum seekers and those you have identified, is so critical. There needs to be a long-term strategy to create a capital fund at the centre of government that provides resource to local authorities to provide housing and support to these vulnerable groups, prison leavers, people in the asylum system, victims of domestic violence, and families that are in priority need facing homelessness. If you create a single capital fund that can provide accommodation for these groups that is funded by central Government—and there are different funding mechanisms, without going into detail, that I believe the Treasury is looking at that are within the fiscal rules set by the Chancellor—here is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift the dial on how you provide accommodation and support for multiple vulnerable groups at the local level with sustainable funding in place. That is the only way that we will get the step change that is required, and deliver economies of scale that should be within the purview of local areas to deliver to meet the needs of vulnerable groups. At the moment, Whitehall is competing against itself to access housing and support for these different vulnerable groups. That, if you think about it, is a ludicrous waste of public funds.

You have touched on suitable accommodation, and we have had evidence on this. Large sites—are they ever suitable?

It depends what you mean by a large site. I think what a lot of people do not perhaps think about is that the hotels in themselves are large sites, so you can have 200 or 300 people living in a large site. There is a lot less scrutiny of those locations—I am not sure how many hotels there are at the moment, but it is a lot—so you tend to get a lot more people talking about sites like Wethersfield or Napier, or, in the past, Penally. There are examples where you can have sites that are used for a very short period to support good initial arrival. We have seen that in Syrian resettlement, for example. It is a very different model. It should not be part of a permanent accommodation system, because people spend months and sometimes years in the system. There are things that people get from being within a community that you cannot get from a large-scale site that is out of touch with the community. Of course, you want everywhere to be safe and you want to have certain standards in place, and that should be a given whatever the accommodation. What you cannot easily replicate are the other things that people tell us they value from being in community-based accommodation. From a human perspective, there are things that we would all recognise are important for us to feel human and to be well, to be able to participate in local communities. If you are in a large-scale site, you are cut off from society, essentially—or at least from communities, in the way that you are when you are living in a community. At some point, you will leave that large-scale site, and it makes that onward pathway, whatever that is, more difficult for everybody involved. Surely it is better to have people learning new skills, learning English and contributing through volunteering, as people so often do. I look at my own team volunteers. We have an incredible team of about 1,000 volunteers who work in my team. About half of those people have been in the asylum system or have been displaced. People want to contribute and participate. That can help with some of the issues that otherwise people experience when they are in an isolated room miles from everywhere, whether that is on a large-scale site like Wethersfield or somewhere like a hotel on the side of the A1.

It is instructive to look at how we managed support and accommodation for Afghans when they arrived. We did not put them in large former military sites for weeks and months on end; we rapidly moved them into community accommodation. Remember, the majority, at least six out of 10 people, who come through the asylum system will be supported to go on and rebuild their lives as refugees in our communities. There are certain nationalities, for example Afghans, where you could be supporting with that process, that move and integration from day one. Large sites do not facilitate that. The risk with large sites is that the location is often very isolated, and the quality of the provision and the infrastructure around it is often very poor. It is also very difficult to put in good quality casework and legal support for people in large sites.

I have a couple of things to add on lessons to be learned on large sites. I read in the Home Office’s evidence that they are proposing a site in a town in the north. I think it is a former student halls, which is part of the Government’s considerations—that, and disused care homes. If the Home Office is going to go through with that it needs to reflect on lessons learnt, particularly from Wethersfield. We have seen from large sites that having a huge number of individuals with complex mental health problems and trauma that go untreated for extended periods of time, unable to work and engage with the local community, creates significant problems. In the long run, that increases their dependency and their need for local services because their health very rapidly deteriorates, in our experience. One thing I want to quickly touch on is that we have seen in what they refer to as large sites—barracks and vessels—an onsite medical provision. That seems like a fantastic idea, but the way that it has been delivered has been insufficient in terms of the quality of care that is provided and the lack of monitoring by the Home Office, but also the information sharing. If vulnerable asylum seekers are presenting to an onsite medical provision and saying, “I am having suicidal thoughts”—not an uncommon occurrence, unfortunately—there needs to be some effective and data-protecting information sharing in place that allows them to raise that with the Home Office and ensure that those urgent needs are responded to effectively.

We will move on to allocation of accommodation. I am conscious of time, so if one person has made your point, perhaps do not say it again.

Megan, you have stated that the current system for allocating accommodation is not working. How often do you see asylum seekers moving across accommodation? We discussed earlier what the impact is. There is a shortage of housing countrywide, so local authorities and housing providers will always have to try to manage that. Against that backdrop, what do you think the Home Office could do to make a real change?

Moving across accommodation is a frequent occurrence. That can be moving across hotels when people are in initial accommodation, often without reason. Sometimes it is because hotels have closed quite suddenly, so individuals are dispersed or moved to another hotel in a completely different region without a proper assessment of their needs. Often, for example, the Home Office has accepted that a family needs to stay in a location because the mother is in a high-risk pregnancy and she is receiving specific medical treatment, but that is either forgotten or disregarded and it is proposed that they are dispersed in another place. That is a frequent issue, and one that I would encourage the Home Office to reflect on when it is looking at closing hotels and how that is managed. Secondly, in terms of what the Home Office can do better—I completely appreciate the issue with the shortage of accommodation and the stress of the housing market—from our perspective, the Home Office needs to improve its systems that assess what people need. There are significant failures in that process from the beginning of the initial screening of individuals throughout the time they are in the asylum accommodation system. Those failures do not save time or money in the long run, it seems, because someone will be moved to inadequate accommodation and that then has to be picked up through the supporting contractors, voluntary services and legal aid lawyers. It is important to get that system right and assess that need before you move people, and that is what is lacking.

Where this Government is trying to lessen the use of hotels, do you think that unless you get the systems right, whatever the accommodation and whatever your plan is moving forward, without the safeguards we are moving in the wrong direction?

Completely. I am concerned that we will see what we have seen in the past where hotels are closed with limited notice and people are dispersed without any consideration, and it will not work. Regardless of what accommodation people are placed in, unless you assess and respond to need, we will be in the same position.

Let me bring in Will Forster.

Thank you. I will talk about communication escalation routes. What has been your experience of working with the Home Office and its providers to resolve issues with asylum accommodation and make improvements to the system? Alex, you described asylum seekers experiencing inadequate and inconsistent communication from providers. Why do you think communication is such a challenge?

Building out from Megan’s last answer, whatever is happening, people need to know what is going on. There are a range of reasons why communication may not be great, and the starting point is often that there are low levels of trust. This is where communication is not good; I have spoken about where it is, in some cases, and it can be. There is sometimes an assumption that because you have a guide about how things work, what goes on and how to raise a concern, people will have understood it and they will know it exists. Often when people come to us—as I said, that can be a couple of months after they have moved into a particular hotel—they do not know about what their rights are and how to raise a complaint. They might have been experiencing something that they want to complain about, but they did not feel safe to raise it for that very reason. It is part of this very mixed and inconsistent picture around who people trust; about people being clear on the processes to follow; and about people understanding at as early a point as possible what goes on, how things work and what their rights are. On the earlier question around when a hotel is closed or when someone has moved from one hotel to another or from one accommodation setting to another, it is about giving as much notice as possible and explaining to people what is going on and why it is happening. As I am sure any of us can understand, that can be a very distressing and disruptive moment. We put this in our written evidence, and we have examples every week of people who are, rightly, moved from accommodation settings. For example, a woman who has experienced sexual gender-based violence might have had a poor initial vulnerability assessment process and been moved into accommodation that was not sufficient for their needs. Perhaps it was a shared room in mixed-sex accommodation without access to the local support that they would need. Maybe with intervention, they would be moved to another hotel, but they might not have realised what is going on. We have had cases where people have been moved in the middle of the night with no notice, and I cannot imagine how distressing that would be. There are some real basics going wrong. Again, there is a spectrum. You will have examples of good communication, where people have been going the extra mile. Last week I was in Derby speaking to a team there about a great local initiative called the New Arrivals Alliance. It is a thing that has been developed through partnership work between the voluntary sector, statutory organisations, the local authority and people who have arrived into Derby, whether that is through the asylum system or through another scheme like resettlement or the Homes for Ukraine scheme. The idea is that you improve that system for everybody. It is a great initiative. That is the stuff we need to build on, because then you are more likely to have a culture that enables good communication to happen and flow. I hope that is helpful, in terms of some of that variation and differences that we see.

Thanks, Alex. Other panel members, what do you think about the Home Office working relationship?

It is very variable. If we have an individual case and we go directly to officials in the Home Office, we will get action. At the local level, it is not necessarily the same. The point I would make is that this has not been designed as a person-centred system that always sees—to quote the most important finding, I think, from the Windrush inquiry—the face behind the case and assist them. It is there to manage and to essentially provide a basic accommodation provision. It is not centred around the needs of individuals like a health system is. The consequences that flow from that are poor communication, poor assessment, poor information sharing—all those things. There is no consistent casework support; it is not built into the system. Inevitably, you get, more often than not, poor outcomes, poor quality and poor performance.

It sounds like you have said that it depends on the circumstances, but you would not immediately recommend that we want a stronger Home Office presence directly in accommodation to resolve issues. You do not think that would help.

It might make a bit of difference around the edges, but the system is not designed with the person at the centre, so fundamentally you will not get the shift around quality of individual needs-based support that people require.

I have mentioned a couple of things already, but, a bit like with a range of other challenges, when it comes to the age-disputed children we support—we have supported about 600 age-disputed children in the last year or so—we find there is an inconsistent approach to how those concerns are acknowledged and responded to. I had an example this morning. One of our managers sent me a note to say that they had raised a concern about an age-disputed child who they were pretty sure was a child. They raised it with the accommodation provider, but they were aware that very little action had been taken. They then raised it with one of the statutory organisations, and almost immediate action was taken. It is very mixed and very variable. It is a recurrent theme, of course, in what we have all been saying: that should not be the case. You should have good policy, good practice, good systems and good culture, and you should have consistency in how these concerns are responded to.

It is a mixture of it all. We have written a lot of reports over the years about the things that should matter in terms of someone’s experience in the asylum system when they are seeking protection. We wrote a report a few years ago called, “We want to be strong, but we don’t have the chance”. It was written by women who were in the asylum system about what that is like. If you do not design a system from a gender perspective, from a trauma perspective, you will end up with a system that delivers some of the outcomes that it delivers today for people. That means that you are too reliant on a good culture being developed that is likely to see things from a trauma-informed or gender-informed perspective, when it should be a given.

I reiterate that where a child’s age is in doubt, the local authority has a duty to treat them as a child under legislation and statutory guidance. That includes accommodating them as children. That is the piece that is often missing. We will often send formal pre-action correspondence to the local authority, which will act—it depends, but reasonably quickly—but what should be happening, one assumes, is that the accommodation provider and the Home Office should be informing the local authority that there is an age-disputed child in their area, then making sure that action is taken. Instead, we see a huge number of age-disputed children in rooms with unrelated adult men. As you can imagine, that is a huge safeguarding issue, particularly for age-disputed minors who have experienced torture, sexual assault and rape in some cases. There is perhaps a lack of a joined-up approach with the local authority.

This is not a very helpful response, but I think it is a mixture of those things.

There is a culture of disbelief around unaccompanied age-disputed children, which permeates much of the approach of the Home Office. We see that in a lot of cases. I think that may be the main thing. Then, I come back to the lack of training and monitoring for hotel staff who are the first point of call for these issues. They should be escalating the matter with the Home Office.

I think that there is a fundamental issue with the guidance that the Committee should note. Essentially, as the guidance stands, accommodation providers are told that as the Home Office has already conducted an age assessment, there has to be a high bar to refer to a further local authority-led assessment. If the bar is set high, you are not an expert on age assessments and you are sitting in some accommodation provision somewhere, you will invariably think, “Well, no. I don’t need to act here”. There are too many cases where the initial assessment of age on arrival has been flawed. As a result, far too many children are being put in potentially high-risk situations in accommodation alongside adults. I do not want to exaggerate, but we have evidence—we have published it recently in a report—to suggest that this is a hidden, simmering safeguarding crisis. Until some appalling incident takes place, we fear that it is not going to get the attention it deserves.

Yes. We would also recommend that the initial assessment at ports—there is evidence from the inspectorate on this point—needs to be far better quality so that we do not have so many poor quality age assessments at ports. It can happen the other way, too. Someone can be wrongly assessed as a child when they are an adult.

I wanted to build slightly on Enver’s point about initial screening and vulnerability assessments. There are recognised standards and ways of doing them better. The UNHCR has some excellent and recognised standards around initial screening and vulnerability assessments, not just the processes but also what is required to develop the right capability in a workforce. I know that is part of the published work plan between UNHCR and the Home Office in their operational framework. That is encouraging, but we have to see it turn into practice beyond the development stage. Hopefully, that will mean we have a much better process of initial screening and assessment over time. The initial screening and assessment must be much better, and the inspection regime and monitoring need to be much better. Those two things alone could make a world of difference.

I want to focus on safeguarding, not just for children but for the whole asylum population. You have talked a lot about the evidence of very poor safeguarding in hotels as well as about some times when it is effective. How do you explain why you sometimes get good safeguarding but you mainly get poor safeguarding in asylum hotels? Do you think that has to do with the design of the contracts, or does it have to do with the delivery of the contracts? I am trying to work out where you are placing the responsibility.

Local leadership makes a big difference.

As in?

Somebody responsible for a hotel setting the right culture and ensuring that the right practice is going on. I have given you a couple of examples already of people who go above and beyond what they are required to do. It is rooted in culture, which begins with the local leadership, whoever that might be. Equally, the other side of that coin is that where you have the wrong leadership, a lack of leadership or poor culture, you will get the opposite.

Can I just be clear about what you mean by local? Do you mean the contractors in the hotels, so Serco, Mears or Clearsprings staff?

It is whoever is responsible for delivering the service on the ground. The on-the-ground experience is where you get the biggest variation.

I think there are fundamental issues at play here. There is an absence of a cohesive and sufficiently robust safeguarding framework. The specific contractual standards around safeguarding in the contracts are not good enough. I also think that there is a lack of detailed accountability mechanisms, which creates significant problems in the system. There is a lack of training. Accommodation providers, those working in hotels or other accommodation settings, do not have enough knowledge and expertise around safeguarding. There is a lack of information sharing, which we have already heard about, which results in poor quality knowledge then carrying with the individual so when they are present in an accommodation setting they can have their safeguarding needs met. These configurations of issues result in poor safeguarding provisions. I know that local authorities are seriously concerned about it, but there is a lack of connection between people, particularly those who have been placed in hotels; and information sharing with local safeguarding boards and functions at the local level has been shocking. There have been cases of people who are very vulnerable, with high safeguarding needs, being placed in hotels, and the local safeguarding authority—the local authority—has not been aware of them.

We have consistently asked for disclosure of the training materials for the accommodation providers that the Home Office oversees and clarity on whether that training is passed down or mandated to be given to subcontractors. We have never been successful. I would ask the Committee, in working with the Home Office, to really understand what the training looks like. This is a massive safeguarding issue. The solicitors have no idea whatsoever, so I think that would be very important, especially with the contracts that are going to continue past the break clause.

You have talked about vast variability across the asylum system. There are only three accommodation providers. Would you comment on which one you have seen as most effective at safeguarding, or if you see particular problems in particular regions or types of hotels? Do you want to comment on that?

The major problem is subcontractors, I think. We saw that recently with Stay Belvedere Hotels, and Clearsprings being told that they needed to end their contract with them. There is a real lack of transparency about subcontractors, who is being used and what the checks, the training, the experiences and the oversight are. I don’t know, but I think that probably causes a huge amount of the variation. I cannot say that any one accommodation provider is better or worse than another. The same issues occur across, so it must inevitably be at least part of the subcontracting framework.

I think there is variability, but fundamentally the contracts do not have sufficiently robust safeguarding requirements within them, and that is a fundamental flaw. There is also a fundamental failure of those providing the accommodation, whether they are welfare managers working for the three providers. They do not have the ability to identify safeguarding risks and needs or understand when they meet the statutory requirement for intervention. Also, if you have in one hotel, for example, one welfare manager for 200 to 300 people, how can they possibly do that job?

Yes, the ratio that Enver has just mentioned can be a problem, as can the subcontracting that Megan mentioned. Sometimes you can see a great development from a standards point of view, such as the minimum standards for responding to survivors of domestic abuse, but the challenge is: how do you know that that has been put into practice, and where is the oversight on the training, monitoring and evaluating what goes on? It is the last-mile stuff again—that very local, on-the-ground level. What is going on? That is what tends to have the least scrutiny, particularly with subcontractors.

We do need to move on to the next panel. I know that there are lots of other questions, but can I thank you for your contributions today? If there is anything further that you want to give the Committee, please do share your thoughts with us. It may well be that we come back to you with further questions. As we go through this process, we are finding that we have many questions. Thank you so much for your time. Apologies, Chris, for cutting you off, but we have another panel coming up. Witnesses: Councillor Peter Mason, Paul Dennett, Natasha Beresford and Frances McMeeking.

We now move on to our second panel of this afternoon’s evidence session on the asylum accommodation contracts. We are very grateful to be joined by representatives from local government. I will start with Frances McMeeking, who is joining us remotely. Perhaps you could introduce yourself, Frances.

Good afternoon. I am the assistant chief officer of social work with responsibility for homelessness, asylum and refugees for the City of Glasgow.

Thank you very much.

I am the Mayor of Salford and the Deputy Mayor for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

I am the strategic director for housing and property services from Dacorum Borough Council.

I am leader of the London Borough of Ealing, and I am here on behalf of the LGA board.

Thank you very much. We are now going to move on to questions about how equitable the distribution of accommodation is, starting with Margaret Mullane.

This question is for Mayor Dennett and Frances McMeeking. Do you think the Home Office plan for equitable distribution will be fair? Do you think it will work?

We have been calling for equitable distribution for some time. In 2022, we saw the immigration Minister mandate the widening of dispersal. Since then, we have certainly seen some progress across the country, but from a Greater Manchester point of view I still feel that we have an unsustainable share of the national asylum population. Outside of London, the north-west region has a disproportionate requirement to provide services and accommodation to people seeking asylum. We have 8% of the national total in Greater Manchester, 28 people in every 10,000 of the population. The UK rate is 15 per 10,000. We have 30% of our total living in contingency hotel accommodation and 433 children. I think we have a long way to go to get to where the Government ultimately want to be. We have to be honest about the fact that there are a number of local authorities in this country that have not played ball with the agenda, in terms of receiving people seeking asylum and refugees. The Government have a tough job on their hands to get some of those local authorities that have resisted engaging with this agenda for many years to start receiving people and playing their part in what is a national response to an emergency.

Glasgow was the only dispersal area in Scotland until 2022, and it remains a significant challenge in the city, with 94% of all asylum cases being accommodated in the city. Mears has over 1,800 properties in the city, so that is having an impact, as you would appreciate, on the property availability. Glasgow is operating at 400% above the dispersal plan. There has been limited and slow movement in terms of properties via Mears across the rest of Scotland, with now 19 local authorities agreeing to accommodate people within their local authority area, out of the other 31 local authorities. There remains a distinct difference in terms of proportionality of having to accommodate asylum seekers in the city, which is obviously having wider impacts on health, social care and education, to name just a few. There is also a wider issue in Scotland about a lack of progress around a rural procurement strategy, despite the efforts of a number of local authorities that would want to engage meaningfully with the Home Office around how that would look and how that would be managed. Again, there are opportunities going forward to do more work around increasing the pipeline across the wider portfolio in Scotland, but there is a lot of comments already in our response about some of the challenges that this presents to Glasgow.

Thank you. Do you think that the Home Office should have some levers to try to help make this happen, so it is fair and equitable? What is a good outcome for local areas in the asylum dispersal?

In the context of full dispersal from 2022 onwards, we have seen local authorities very much increasingly step up to the plate. We now have 106 additional local authorities providing asylum accommodation in localities, and that is part of the agreement, of course, in which local authorities sign up to regional targets. As has been identified, one of the significant challenges in achieving fairer distribution—it is right to say that there is disproportionality at the moment; about 10 local authorities are currently accommodating about 22% of the asylum seeker population—is that we do need to see a shift in the way that that accommodation is procured through providers. There are challenges, not just in terms of the aspects of rural areas that have been identified, but equally providers perhaps focusing too closely on accommodation costs. That invariably ends up meaning that there is a focus towards parts of northern England rather than the south-east and, of course, there is certainly a concentration in urban locations. What we would like to see is greater collaboration between the Home Office and with providers agreeing and sticking to the allocations that are contained within regional targets. If we are able to do that more clearly, some of the challenges that were identified by the previous panel around competition for housing in the current market between resettlement programmes that are sponsored by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in addition to all the challenges that local government are facing at the moment through temporary accommodation and homelessness, we can have a better, more co-ordinated approach to vulnerability of people in our housing stock.

The reality is that there is the same inequitable distribution of dispersal within the eastern region. Since the dispersal programme was widened, the same seven local authorities in the east have continued to have increased dispersal within their local authority areas, despite those local authorities having achieved plan, and dispersal continues within those ongoing areas. One of the factors that we consider, as referenced by both the first panel and Councillor Peter Mason, is the inequitable arrangements that are in existence in respect of the contract—in particular, the arrangements that enable procurement in less expensive areas and the issues that arise in being able to procure accommodation in those more expensive urban areas, particularly those with proximity to London, for the east, and the disparity that exists between the two providers.

In reference to Scotland, there is a geographical imbalance where Mears seeks to procure its DA property. In Scotland, we currently have 13 local authorities that have declared a housing crisis and, undoubtedly, this is contributing to the lack of suitable accommodation across the country. Perversely, as my colleagues have referenced, the contract seems to be based solely on relatively cheap pricing of properties, and therefore that is driving Mears’ agenda about where it can procure those properties in available areas. Such areas can often face a variety of deprivation and social economic imbalance, which leads to concern about community cohesion in those areas, and it is counter to the equitable approach to dispersal that is outlined in the plan for 2022. There is a converse effect on communities, in terms of that strategy.

I am going to bring Paul in, but I will just press on the point around the Home Office levers. Do they have the levers they need to make the distribution equitable?

The Home Office obviously has engaged in a contract here. Do I know the specifics of that contract? No. Nevertheless, I think the Government embraced new public management many years ago, and the whole notion of contracting and commissioning the delivery of services was deemed a way of efficiently discharging our responsibilities. The contract should provide the Government, and certainly the Home Office in this case, with the levers to genuinely deliver accountability and good outcomes for the people we seek to serve. I would like to think that if it is not written in that way, we have a bit of a problem, and it is back to the drawing board with the lawyers, dare I say it, in terms of renegotiating that contract. Fundamentally, I think we need to move away from a cost-driven approach to procurement. This is a commercial contract; it is about making profit, at the end of the day. Therefore, the providers will always go to those areas of the country where housing values are the lowest, and we need to be really honest about that. Can Serco procure expensive properties in certain parts of even my own city, the city of Salford, where we do not have properties being procured but in certain wards of the city we are way over the quota for the overall city? We need to do that. We need to hold them to account. I think there is something about public transparency here, and the Home Office getting information out into the public domain to hold providers to account. We also need to increase our presence in other regions. It is not up until fairly recently, I would say, under the current Government that we have started to get a bit more transparency around how the north-west actually compares with other regions of the country. We have not always been able to compare ourselves and contrast ourselves to ensure others are playing ball. We also need to reduce those properties in areas where we are over-planned. I know of a number of wards across Greater Manchester where that is seriously the case, but with that does come challenges. Colleagues have already talked about rurality, and therefore the offer, the service delivery model, needs to reflect that. There needs to be different transportation and support infrastructure, and we need to ensure that access to those services is at the heart of the contract and how the contract is ultimately being delivered. I think there is a huge opportunity for the Home Office to deepen its collaboration with local authorities, with combined authorities, with regional strategic migration partnerships to properly get better outcomes from the existing contractual relationships.

Councillor Mason, what do local areas need to do for asylum dispersal to function well? We all know when it goes wrong what it looks like, but what does it look like when it goes well?

We have to bear in mind that very often local communities completely understand, as local authorities do, their duty and their responsibility in supporting and providing networks of support to those who are going through the process of dispersal. There are plenty of voluntary and community sector organisations and networks—not least the ones who presented to you at the previous session—that step into the breach, when required, to ensure that they are providing the wraparound support that quite often the providers of accommodation are not able to provide or are not providing. The challenge is, to some extent—we also need to bear in mind the broader context of general needs housing in the country—the procurement of accommodation inside an environment of a contracting market, not least in the private rented sector, and of course the slowdown in house building that we have seen over the last few years as a consequence of inflation, interest rates and the rises in bill costs and so on. That all means that it is an incredibly difficult market from which to procure from. Essentially, as has been identified, that has really reduced or targeted procurement in lots of particular locations and has caused the challenges that that does. We cannot see this in isolation outside of the broader housing challenge. If that is going to be alleviated, you have to look at general needs housing supply as much as anything else. Local authorities up until very recently were not funded for the activity that is happening to support asylum seekers in those locations. Of course, in the year that has now started, the funding has increased, and that is very welcome. But, as is always the case in local government and particularly local government finance, the sporadic nature of year-on-year funding means that long-term planning is incredibly difficult. Contingency accommodation may well be turned on or off in particular time periods, but dispersal accommodation is pretty consistent. What local authorities would really need in the funding context is for this area of responsibility and duty to be considered inside the comprehensive spending review and local government finance settlements to ensure that it is adequately funded so that we can plan for the long term.

This is a final question to everybody. How should equity of distribution be balanced against other considerations you have all mentioned, such as cost?

From my perspective, in respect of equity of distribution, coming back to Paul’s previous point, it is important to look at the contractual elements and ensure that the focus is not around profit-driven activity, and that the regional aspects around the market position are considered in the contracts. That is critical. Failure to do that will result in discrepancies across regions and within regions. In particular, the unintended consequences or inflating the private sector market are directly contributing to homelessness and the challenges that have been talked to, in respect of pressures on your wider infrastructure, increasing demand for local authorities in respect of households in temporary accommodation and being able to prevent homelessness. By that, I mean the inability to prevent homelessness by using the private sector, because of that direct competitive activity that is happening within a region. We are currently seeing providers playing off local authorities in order to inflate the market and incentivising landlords who come to the table to support procurement of dispersal.

On this equity point, you seem to be saying that the contractors are pursuing the cheapest accommodation they can get and that is leading to distortions. On the other hand, the cost has risen from £18,000 per asylum seeker per year to £41,000 last year. How do you square those two facts, because the costs have utterly ballooned? Not to put words in your mouth, but people tend to tell us that the backlog has grown, although it is still a per capita increase. Does that sufficiently explain it from your perspective?

I think that Frances wanted to come in.

Chair, I was going to speak to the previous point, about being more transparent about the pipeline data and procurement process. Our experience in Scotland is that despite hundreds of properties being considered, it is a very small percentage that are actually then procured, and we get no information about why the rest have been discounted or not continued. There is a real disconnect and certainly lots of work from local authorities to work with Mears, in our case, to make sure they are identifying the right property so the failure rate is not so significant. Less than 10% are finally procured.

For me, one of the key drivers here is the chronic lack of truly affordable housing, which is driving the cost. We all know the impact of right to buy. We all know the language games that have been played with affordable housing, certainly since 2011 when the national planning policy framework incorporated a definition that talked about affordability being 80% of market rents, and having no relationship whatsoever with the local housing allowance and welfare benefits. We all know the impact of welfare reforms and the chronic undersupply of truly affordable housing—that is, housing at social rents and local housing allowance. The cumulative impact of all that over time is colossal. Now the Government have no choice but to depend on the market, ultimately, and the private rented sector to discharge some of their duties around the asylum contracts with the three organisations that have already been mentioned. For me, the primary driver is what is happening within housing, and then throw into the mix inflation, ineffective contract management and goodness knows what levels of profit are being made. Throw into the mix the transaction costs that must be paid for around what is an elaborate system, and you have a real challenge on your hands in how you get those costs down. Where do you place people? There is a dependency here on the market that has been created over time by consecutive decisions of government.

To add to that point, costs are very likely to have significantly risen because of the incentives that are being provided and paid to landlords to achieve the dispersal requirements. Examples of discussions that we as a local authority have had with landlords is that they are being directly proposed and offered incentives of £7,000 per property to acquire units. Local authorities are not able to compete in that market, and then you see ceiling prices driven up.

That is in the eastern region?

Yes.

Your provider is Serco?

We have two providers, Serco and Clearsprings Ready Homes.

If the model, as you have just said, should not be driven by cost, what would a new procurement model look like? What should be the criteria outwith what you have already said about equitable dispersion? What should be the criteria by which we should select asylum accommodation? Do you have any thoughts on that?

From my perspective, Paul Dennett touched earlier on the importance of working collaboratively with local authorities and strategic migration teams. We would welcome those conversations. It is important to understand the nuances of a region but also the nuances that exist within a region, ensuring that contracts are considerate of the markets, and that the decisions and the parameters placed within the contract are based on affordability and average market levels.

As has been said, the collaboration between the Home Office and local authorities can always be strengthened to have a proper understanding of local need, particularly in areas of high demand, say in urban locations where some of that disproportionality exists. While the housing market continues to be in the situation that it is in, and while we continue to see very low levels of starts on site of general needs housing and affordable housing, I am afraid the situation feels like it is only going to get worse before it is going to get better. Much of that also needs to be done in a planned way with local authorities so we can also ensure the appropriate wraparound support, and some of the discussions that I am sure we are going to get into later around safeguarding and vulnerability, are put in place, too. Too often, at the moment, local authorities perhaps feel that decisions are being taken to them rather than with them about the speed of contingency accommodation, in particular, in terms of how quickly it is brought on stream, but local government is always ready to step up and step into the discussions that we need to have to operationalise accommodation where it is needed. Very often—in fact, it is always the case—a local authority will have a very deep understanding of its local housing market. We will know that from all our interactions from other elements of our activity, whether it is the planning and licensing functions or our responsibilities in fire, health and safety in building control. We have a deep understanding of our housing markets, and that is the intelligence that we would love to deploy into the decisions that are being taken by the Home Office and by providers in the subcontracting conversations that those providers have to locate homes.

I would say that if your default is looking at the contract between the providers and the Home Office, the relationship has fundamentally failed. All the contract literature and the academic literature corroborates that. This is about trust and confidence, and about trying to think systemically about this. What is the relationship between, in our case, Serco, the Home Office, the combined authority, the 10 local authorities of Greater Manchester and, importantly, the voluntary community, faith and social enterprise sector? How do we all work together as a single system to genuinely discharge our duties but also primarily to support people seeking asylum and refugees? Within that space, how do we coproduce? How do we give voice to the very people we are trying to provide services to and how do we assure ourselves as a collective system that what we are doing is genuinely meeting need and driving outcomes? I think we have a long way to go. At the moment there is an opportunity to think cross-departmentally on this agenda and to drive an agenda of integration focus and support ultimately involving local government and involving regional strategic migration partnerships. At the moment, local government financing, as we know, is going through a review. Minister McMahon is undertaking a wholescale review of that. For me, that is an opportunity to properly consider this agenda and the relationship between MHCLG and ultimately the Home Office, specifically with regard to trying to get us into that space where we have flexible, multi-year funding settlements linked to the flow of asylum seekers within the system. This is not just about allocating money to local authorities; it is about allocating based on where asylum seekers go and how we support services and actors within those spaces as well as those wider impacts on services and accommodation. I think there is a huge opportunity before us now, and maybe devolution also provides us with an opportunity to think differently about how we discharge this contractual relationship.

If we are going to continue contracting with hotels, what would be your advice to the Home Office to facilitate better collaborative working, to make sure that it works more effectively for local authorities and the local area? Are there any actions or improvements that you would like to see come from the Home Office specifically?

For me, the emphasis is on trust, collaboration and clear communication. Transparency is key. I think Peter and Paul have talked about the importance of a whole system approach and looking cross-departmentally. There are a lot of opportunities, notwithstanding what has already been shared, to look at the wider pressures on the system. For example, within our region we have explored with our providers the opportunity to tap into the empty homes market. Nationally, there are a significant number of empty dwellings within one local authority area; it is thousands of empty dwellings. That is a vital untapped resource, and the opportunity that it might provide is currently not being explored. There is emphasis already provided in respect of safeguarding community cohesion and ensuring wraparound support. That is critical for me. I would like to see greater integration with safeguarding adults boards in respect of the contract and contract oversight, but also ensuring that the voluntary sector is considered in the wider infrastructure asks.

Certainly, in the context of the Government’s direction on contingency accommodation and scaling away hotels, there are local governance pilots happening in different parts of the country that are looking at better models for doing precisely what has been described. Hopefully, as those work their way through development, we will develop those models. Those conversations are currently happening to establish whether there are different mechanisms and different models that can be deployed to get better outcomes. I concur with my fellow panellists that the current situation is not fit for purpose, and hopefully those pilots will produce some positive results.

I do think the pilots are a positive change in direction, and that has been approached in a very open and transparent way. There has been lots of dialogue with local authorities about what can be achieved, specifically, in my case anyway, in Scotland, around support models. The transparency around what is currently provided has been sadly lacking over a number of years. That relates back to the comments from colleagues particularly in relation to safeguarding. One other area that we are very keen in Scotland to work through is the data sharing issue. For a range of vital information—I cannot stress how vital it is around safeguarding, in particular—we have seen regression in the last two years, so we get less and less information. That then makes it difficult to work in partnership cohesively in that joined-up approach across significant pieces of work about community planning, cohesion and the strategic planning that goes on in a city around accommodation and affordable housing. Data sharing might sound a small issue, but it is critical to the relationship.

We have heard that from local authorities on the ground. This is my final question. The nature of net migration is that you are going to see these surges, and I know we all want certainty around numbers. Is there anything the Home Office can do to help you with contingency planning for when we do see these spikes?

I think it is about early notification. Of course, there are going to be situations in which there are surges. Unfortunately, that is the nature, as you say, of what is happening. There are protocols in place to ensure that we should be notified, as local authorities, of the Home Office’s intention to open a contingency hotel or a contingency large or medium-sized site in a particular area. Sometimes the aspiration is not necessarily met with the delivery, and the commitment to that protocol is incredibly important, not least because—it is worth repeating—we are dealing with incredibly traumatised, vulnerable people who do not just require a roof over their heads; they also require a series of support services. That is particularly true of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, who will need direct access to social services, and our social services will need direct access to them. There is a whole range of services that need to be operationalised very quickly. Local government continues to do that very effectively and very efficiently when we can, and there are great examples of local authorities that have done that at breakneck speed. That commitment to communication, clarity, timelines, open dialogue on accommodation that may be proposed and any challenges that might arise with the quality of that accommodation—very often local authorities can provide that expert guidance on the local housing market to be able to address any of those challenges.

We have heard consistently from the previous panel, and it has been raised today, about the adequacy of the accommodation. I think this has been answered, but I would be interested to see what you think the way forward is. Do you think the Home Office has a strong enough oversight of what the providers are delivering on the ground?

From my perspective, no. I have an example of a contingency hotel within our region, and in fact directly within my local authority region, and engagement with the Home Office has been very slow when raising significant and pertinent issues. There have been issues of community cohesion and community safety, and significant concerns around antisocial behaviour, and we have had to draw on community safety partnership governance structures to effect action. Police have had to be drawn into very difficult discussions, which have been protracted and very drawn out over many months. Examples that were being presented to the Home Office in respect of these sites were met with delays and the need to verify their assurance arrangements in respect of safeguarding. That is still, after five months, not fully verified. There have been significant issues in relation to impacts around mental health, threats to kill, serious incidents and use of weapons, and concerns from residents on site that unreasonable force is often used by members of security when dealing with incidents on site. In this particular example, our policing colleagues as part of the partnership enacted policing powers to take action by service of a community protection warning on the providers in order to try to effect change. Mitigations provided on site were provided by the two-tier local authorities rather than the provider and the Home Office themselves. It took several months before the Home Office team and the managing directors of the providers visited the site to inspect it for themselves.

When we have been visiting sites—I will not name the particular site—there were accusations of security bullying. What you have just related to us, the Home Office would have little or no idea of that going on?

Correct, until that is shared with it directly by the local authority. The information that had been shared in this example was overwhelming: significant indicators of policing logs around the volume of attendance at the site, and, in fact, calls to policing from individuals working on site saying that they needed help and they could not contain and manage the situation. We were wholly unassured of the appropriate mitigation and safeguarding arrangements on that site. I heard on the previous panel individuals requesting sight of safeguarding training that had been delivered. After four months of asking, we were able to have sight of a training pack that had been delivered to staff, but it was for a site not within our region and for a different provider. When we engaged with officers working on the ground, they could not clearly indicate to you what their safeguarding escalating arrangements were and what their protocol would be in a serious incident. The mitigation within this particular community is provided by the local authority. My plea in this situation would be that the local authority has the experience in safeguarding adults and children, and any contract in future arrangements must draw on the existing arrangements that lie with the local authority.

We have some questions about safeguarding and vulnerable people from Joani Reid, and then we will move on to refugee homelessness with Chris Murray. Then we will wrap up by talking about the future.

Our understanding is that the Home Office has emphasised that the safeguarding duty lies not with the provider but with the local authority. What do you think should be the role of the Home Office in safeguarding vulnerable people within its accommodation? What should that process and model look like?

From my perspective, drawing on the comments from the previous panel, there is a real focus on ensuring that there is robust needs assessment and that accommodation is reflective of an individual’s needs. That is important, ensuring that there is a person-centred approach.

Who do you think should do that?

The Home Office should set the parameters in liaison with migration partnerships and local authorities. We have the experience and the knowledge. You heard earlier from the panel about the wealth of experience that we have and that we deploy daily in supporting vulnerable individuals across our communities, be that individuals who are victims of domestic abuse, victims of crime, and so on. The experience lies with us and the steer and the advice in respect of that—I would expect collaboration in developing those arrangements. The Home Office should employ, in my opinion, an audit and assurance function that is robust and reflective of those agreed arrangements.

In Greater Manchester we have been receiving a reported increase in the presentation of age-disputed young people within adult hotels. Thinking about responsibility here, I think that points initially to the adequacy of the process of determining people’s age. That happens at the port, so arguably there is an ask here for the Home Office and border control in terms of the process that is gone through before these individuals even enter into that contractual relationship with the Home Office. Then we have real concerns with regard to the speed with which provider referrals are shared with children’s services within local authorities. Within the contract, we understand there is a lack of contractual requirement to retain separate bedrooms when there are these age disputes within the hotels. For me, there are some practical things we can do here to address some of these real safeguarding concerns. There are a number of opportunities to prevent and to manage vulnerabilities within the contract, but ultimately it is about working quickly and working with those partners that are the local authorities, the combined authorities and regional strategic migration partnerships to properly deliver a system where we have a coherent view of the truth and we work promptly and rapidly when we have safeguarding and welfare concerns.

Beyond that initial assessment that you mentioned, is it possible to have an effective model whereby the welfare officer is doing that assessment? Surely, when they initially arrive at port, all their safeguarding issues might not come out at that moment in time. Is it possible to have a good, robust relationship with the provider so that you are able to identify any emerging safeguarding issues? Do you think that is done effectively at the moment, or does it have to change?

I think the Home Office has made some recent changes that are to be positively welcomed, but it is within the hotel accommodation, not within the dispersal accommodation, where they literally have people on site supporting people seeking asylum with the whole induction and orientation process. Let’s get this right. These are people coming into this country, fleeing their home country, often not being able to speak our language. Giving them a “welcome to the UK” pack and wishing them the best is not the model. I think the Home Office more recently has started to address some of that, with people on site in hotel accommodation providing that support around e-visas, for example, and some of the recent changes, but also that information, advice and guidance—the signposting that anyone would naturally need coming to a community that they do not know and have very little awareness about. For me, ramping that up across all hotels but also ensuring it is available for dispersal accommodation, so accommodation that is not hotels, seems like an obvious next step.

Just to follow on from that, it is about ensuring consistency across all regions and providers, because in my experience there is not consistency in those arrangements in hotels. There is often a significant time delay, and in some cases somebody is in crisis before there are referrals and the relevant arrangements are stood up. In incidents we have been directly engaged with, individuals have been hospitalised because those delays have not been acted upon. I think those things can be built into contracts, but you need the advice and the expertise of the relevant parties around the table to ensure that that is done robustly.

To underscore the importance of the assessment at port of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, a series of freedom of information requests were made for a period of six months at the end of 2024 that demonstrated that there had been about 603 referrals from contingency hotels in about 63 local authorities, where after assessment 50% of those individuals who had been thought to be adults were actually children. That is a significant cause for concern for local authorities, not least, of course, because of the outcomes for those children in receiving the care and support that they need. There is also a practical concern. If assessed at port, a child who is an unaccompanied asylum-seeking child is allocated to the national transfer scheme according to an allocation rate that means that local authorities are not exceeding the quota of 0.1% of child population. If those children invariably are assessed incorrectly and find themselves in adult hotels and are then subsequently assessed, the local authority does become rightly responsible for their care arrangements. In some circumstances, that has meant that one local authority alone found itself having to find accommodation for an additional 20 looked-after children following assessment. That is a significant pressure on a local authority care team, who invariably will be dealing with a caseload that quite often, in the current context, will be very high in the first place. That point on vulnerability and the assessment of age at port is incredibly important.

That last point is key in terms of the local authority position, but also in respect of two-tier local authorities where your safeguarding responsibility sits with the upper and funding is provided at the lower tier, so you then have nuances around the arrangements and the funding powers and sharing between those local authorities. That is something that needs to be considered further.

I want to ask a question about when a decision on someone’s case has been made and they have been granted refugee status. Obviously, a lot of these are single men. First of all, the Home Office has extended the move-on period, and I wonder what your views are on that. Secondly, what is the impact on your homelessness provision generally? Finally, do you have any suggestions of how the move-on process could be improved?

In relation to the 56 days, we welcome it and we think that it is definitely a step in the right direction, but thus far it has had limited impact. We are still seeing the 28-day notice period. Within my own services, particularly in Glasgow, we have a robust asylum refugee bridging team that reach into the hotel environment to work with households and families as they move into the community. We appreciate the 56 days, but we have seen no evidence of that thus far in the last four months. Moving to your question about homelessness, it has been well publicised the challenge that that has presented to the city. At the moment, 42% of our homeless applications are from refugee households who have either travelled to the city from outwith Glasgow or have been given leave to remain in the city. It is a significant pressure where we have seen a 39% increase in two years in our overall homeless applications. That is quite disproportionate to the rest of Scotland—I think I have already explained that—but really disproportionate in terms of that demand on housing.

In our experience in the east, largely the 56-day notification is working and is in operation. That is reliant on local authorities ensuring that they deploy resource to ensure that they are checking daily for new notifications of decisions being issued. One of the challenges that does exist, however, is the way that funding is allocated in respect of bed spaces rather than people. In Hertfordshire, by way of example, what we see are several hotels being utilised as feeder hotels, where funding is provided per bed space rather than individually. There is a significant churn in respect of individuals, adding pressure to the system. Particularly in the case of large volumes of single males, that increases pressures on night shelters and other food bank provision. We are also seeing growing pressures in relation to community cohesion and modern slavery activity.

On the 56 days, I think it is positive and it should be maintained permanently. The parity with the Homelessness Reduction Act is something we certainly welcome and have campaigned for previously. In terms of move-on, though, there are inevitably challenges here. This is not existing in a vacuum. This is happening at the same time as we have a huge housing and homelessness crisis, which is playing out disproportionately in different parts of the country. To give you some key stats for Greater Manchester, we have 5,819 households currently in temporary accommodation costing us £75 million per year, much of which we cannot reclaim through the housing benefit subsidy system. Of those people in temporary accommodation, 8,342 are children, and that is up 968% since 2010. It gives you a real indication of how this is playing out disproportionately in different parts of the country. We have 90,301 households sitting on our housing waiting list across the 10 local authorities across Greater Manchester, and since September 2024 the data tells us that 856 of the households are in bed and breakfast accommodation, which is a useful proxy for how difficult it is to procure truly affordable housing because of all the supply challenges we talked about earlier. Within those households, 395 include households with children. That is up 1,262% since 2010. That needs to be considered within the broader context of homelessness and rough sleeping. We had the absolute crisis when the Government introduced accelerated asylum, which in principle is a good thing. What Government did not do at the time, though, was to work with local authorities and combined authorities to properly plan for the consequences of that. My local authority did not budget for what we had to do in establishing a welfare hub so that people were not sleeping rough on our streets at night in the run-up to Christmas, in the winter months. It is shocking. That has cost us nearly £500,000 so far, the welfare hub, since we have had to step that up, and that is just in Salford. That is one of the local authorities. For me, on what I was saying earlier about that collaboration and that partnership, I do genuinely think there is a huge opportunity here for the Home Office to work with combined authorities and local government and the LGA in coming up with a much better way of working. We are grappling with this crisis management time and time again, whether that is being told that a hotel is going to be set up within a week, or whether that is the consequences of accelerated asylum. There has to be a better way of delivering all this that puts people at the heart of what this contract is all about and whatever that contract looks like in the future. I am convinced there are better ways of operating the current asylum system.

That takes me on to the final question, which is a question for you all. I will take each of you in turn. We want to make recommendations about how to improve this contractual relationship. From a local government point of view and a local authority point of view, how could this be made better?

Fundamentally, what local authorities need is a coherent and open seat at a table that is based on a regional and subregional plan—a place-based plan—not just for asylum hotels, whether that is contingency or dispersal accommodation in the context of the Home Office, but also in relation to the other accommodation pressures from other Government Departments, whether that is the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office for the resettlement programmes or MHCLG and the wider context of the provision of temporary accommodation and other forms of accommodation in the current market. The commitment to do that in a better way is recognised in the conversations that are happening around some of those trials as we move forward to, I hope, the end of the use of hotels by 2029 and within the life of this Parliament. That commitment to an open dialogue is incredibly important because we need to move away, as has rightly been highlighted, from crisis management to effective planning. That equally needs to be recognised in the context of local authorities and their resourcing. We are no longer in a situation where, particularly in dispersal accommodation, this is somehow a new or different duty. This is now mainstream activity that local authorities are performing, and rightly so, across the range of support, safeguarding and social care services. That needs to be appropriately considered in the long-term funding of local authorities, too.

What role should the local authorities have, and should it be mandatory or voluntary?

Under full dispersal, it is mandatory. As we have said, local authorities are all signed up to taking their fair share, rightly, of asylum seekers and vulnerable people and embedding them and supporting them to lead healthy, happy lives in this country. What we need to ensure is that the systems and processes are put in place to adequately support local authorities to do that and that the Home Office and the suppliers live up to the expectations that rightly should be placed on them in terms of their engagement with us to provide the accommodation and support that those asylum seekers need.

One of the areas I would want to focus on is transparency and partnership working, true transparency, much more engaging conversations about what contracts need to look like going forward and being at the table talking about our local plans. One of the things that is not in the contract just now is about skills, learning and giving people the opportunity to be active members of communities, working with the Home Office to build a community in the areas that we would then plan, particularly in Scotland, across all 32 local authorities. All 32 have signed up for that, so I think that there are real opportunities to change the dialogue around asylum and to make sure there is a local plan that then builds on that regionally.

For me, there are a number of things. One is continuing the work that has already started around fairer distribution to make sure every local authority in the country plays its part in what is a national emergency, in many respects. I think we need a clear support offer for integration and prevention, and that should start from day one. It should not just be about handing someone a pack and accommodation. This is about being person-centric. It is about co-producing that. It is about valuing lived experience and learning from engagement to reinforce how we deliver the contract and how we learn from that as that moves through. We have to think short term about this and long term. I am being honest: I don’t think that we are going to address all these issues overnight. Certainly, with the housing supply issues, it will take considerable time to address years and years of failed housing policy in this country. Good things have started around move-on and homelessness, and with the 56 days, as we have already talked about. We need to learn from accelerated asylum and where we have gone wrong there, and how we can better improve that working relationship with combined authorities and local authorities. I know colleagues have already touched on data sharing, but that is a huge issue at the moment. It is sporadic. Sometimes we get reasonable engagement and then it falls off a cliff and we hear nothing. There needs to be consistency, and we need good granular data here to properly strategically plan and to galvanise our partners, including the voluntary community, faith and social enterprise sector. That needs to be individual-level data as well as location specific, and we need to think about how we share that data with housing providers in the round. There are implications for housing associations here, not just local government. There are implications, potentially, for the private rented sector as well and what structures we may or may not have in place in that space. I say that at a time when Mayor Burnham is just about to introduce the Good Landlord Charter in Greater Manchester. We have Awaab’s Law. We have the Renters’ Rights Bill going through Parliament at the moment. We need some coherence there about how that interfaces ultimately with asylum and refugees, and then with social services and health as well.

Can I ask you an explicit question? Should the responsibility move from providers to local authorities in a decentralised model? Should local authorities be responsible for providing—

I don’t think we can simply say yes or no to that. We have to think short term and long term, but we also have to think rationally and empirically and logically about this. To simply hand this contract to local government after 14 years of austerity, after councils have been hollowed out, when regulatory services in terms of housing standards do not really exist and we are having to train the workforce for the future—I think it would be absolute madness, to be perfectly honest with you. I do think we need to put people at the heart of all this. It is not simply a matter of who provides the contract. This is about us all rolling up our sleeves and getting stuck in to form a system that drives outcomes that benefit the people within that system.

I fully endorse the comments made by the previous panellists, but in addition to that, for me, we need a review of the standards in respect of accommodation and the arrangements for regulating those standards. It is not ideal that they sit outside the regulatory framework and there is a lack of influence and accountability for providers in that respect. I would like to see some further review of standards for both contingency accommodation and dispersal accommodation. The Home Office, one would assume, has a significant wealth of information available to it on the flow of activity over recent years. We would welcome an improved demand and supply forecasting model in respect of when to flex the model and stand up new accommodation and short-term sites. In addition, for the east region, incorporating the contingency asylum estate into the dispersal quota is a significant issue. There are a number of local authorities that are reported as significantly under plan and not achieving plan. However, if we were looking to include and incorporate the numbers for the contingency estate, some of those authorities would achieve plan or be very close to plan, so we would welcome a review of that arrangement.

Peter, can I put that final question to you as well? What is your view from an LGA perspective of local authorities taking over responsibility?

Changing the agent in the system is not going to change the system. We need systemic change to housing in this country that ensures that we are delivering great quantities of genuinely affordable homes that are accessible for everybody, whether they are incredibly vulnerable, asylum seekers or currently stuck in temporary accommodation. One in 26 children in London currently is in temporary accommodation; that is one per class in every school in our city. Local authorities are doing their level best with the resources they have available to them, and with the conversations and the input that they have with the Home Office and with providers to be able to do the duties that are expected of them in all those areas. I doubt that simply asking local authorities to take over that responsibility will magic the supply of the quantum of homes we need in this country.

Thank you very much for your time. We have once again completed our time with you. We always have more questions that we would like to ask, but we realise that time is short. If there are any further points that you want the Committee to hear, please do feed them in to us. Thank you all very much for your time today and for your answers to our questions.