UK Struggles to Provide Housing for Afghan Asylum Seekers
Afghan asylum seekers arriving in Britain could experience problems securing suitable housing after ministers ignored the advice of their own officials about how to increase the pool of available accommodation. Pressure on asylum and refugee accommodation is likely to increase due to the influx of Afghans fleeing the Taliban. Guardian analysis has revealed that almost a quarter of the UK’s 44,825 asylum seekers supported by the Home Office are housed in just 10 local authorities, nine of which are among the most deprived in the country. They include Middlesbrough, Cardiff, Rochdale and Glasgow, which has the UK’s highest number of refugees as a proportion of its population. Only one of the top 10 destinations – Barking and Dagenham in London – is in the south of England. Local authorities can veto Home Office requests to accommodate asylum seekers in their areas. As a result, some councils have to support a disproportionate number. In a high court case about asylum accommodation, senior civil servants urged ministers to ditch the local authority veto and instead insist that more local authorities played their part. But ministers did not follow their officials’ advice, choosing instead to use hotels, which on average cost three times the price of the usual dispersal accommodation in shared housing, and controversial military barracks accommodation where there was a mass Covid outbreak earlier this year. In their submissions to ministers, the civil servants believed that requiring more local authorities to house asylum seekers would ensure a sufficient supply of accommodation. The local authorities outside London be put on notice to support these aims. It was recommended that the immigration minister, Chris Philp, should write to local authority chief executives requiring them to support the policy change. It was not clear whether he wrote the letter. There has been no rule change to scrap the veto. Had ministers heeded their own officials’ advice, it is likely that some of the hundreds of Covid cases at Napier barracks could have been avoided, along with some of the issues at hotels, including far-right attacks and a serious decline in the mental health of many asylum seekers housed there. More use of shared housing around the UK for asylum seekers would have led to significant savings to the taxpayer. Burnham said, "The Home Office had broken promises to reduce the number of asylum seekers placed in his area and end the use of hotels. “Home Office civil servants are aware that the government’s current policy is unfair and unsustainable. It is also now clear that it is a political decision of Conservative ministers to reject that official advice and expect only the poorest places in the country to play a part in solving what is a national challenge. While Greater Manchester was willing to step forward, others also had to step up," he stated.
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