Closer to Home: Improving the asylum system through devolution
By David Barclay
A few years ago I was working as an Adviser on migration to the Mayor of Bristol Marvin Rees. It was Covid-times, and part of my role was to try to make sure that people seeking asylum who were cooped up in a hotel in the city had the support they needed. The problem was that the Mayor, and the Local Authority, had virtually no control over the situation whatsoever. The hotel was being run by a private company called Clearsprings Ready Homes, contracted by the Home Office, and even trying to find out what was going on was a challenge. At one point Clearsprings decided they didn’t need to the hotel any more, so with virtually no warning they moved almost 100 residents – mostly families – to various other hotels around the country. Some of the messages received by charities in the city from those being shifted around were truly harrowing. A couple of weeks later we received word that Clearsprings had changed their minds and decided that they did still need the Bristol hotel after all, meaning that the enormous disruption and misery they had caused had all been entirely for nothing.
This experience was a perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with the current asylum system – it’s wildly expensive, hugely inefficient and utterly inhuman in its operation. So what would it look like if asylum accommodation was actually planned around the communities where people live? After months of research and conversations with leaders across the North East and South West of England, we've published Closer to Home - together with The Housing Festival and NACCOM - a report that explores the case for, and conditions of, a more devolved approach to asylum accommodation.
This study builds on research conducted with people with lived experience of being housed in asylum accommodation. The findings of this research, published in the report ‘Treat Us Like Humans’, both contributed to the impetus for us finding an improved solution and have underpinned the principles of what a fundamentally better system could look like.
Through conversation with leaders in the North East and South West of England, we have surfaced and unpacked a range of affordable, sustainable, community-oriented models of asylum accommodation, that collectively could eliminate the need for hotels, improve the dire state of asylum housing, end the profiteering of private providers, and ensure better outcomes for communities.
The case for devolution in England
Stakeholders across both regions make a clear, if carefully qualified, case for devolving greater responsibility for asylum accommodation to local and regional actors. Devolution is framed not as ideological preference, but as a pragmatic response to system failure. People closer to place are better positioned to manage transitions, match accommodation to local housing markets, connect people with local services, and avoid the kinds of design failures - like homelessness - that tend to emerge when decisions are made too far from the ground.
Critical conditions for engagement
Support for devolution is widely caveated. There is no appetite for local-authority-only devolution, which is seen as unworkable given capacity constraints and political exposure. Instead, interviewees converge strongly around a regional-scale model, planned collectively and delivered locally, with risk and responsibility shared across multiple authorities. Any reform must come with genuine, ring-fenced, long-term national funding; clear and distributed roles; robust data-sharing; and managed transition periods. Devolution without real power and resources would, stakeholders warn, simply shift the blame.
Housing supply and innovation
Housing supply constraints are real but not insurmountable. The scale of homes needed to eliminate hotel use - roughly 13,000 households - represents less than 0.5% of housing association stock in England alone. Housing sector interviewees were notably unfazed by this figure. A range of supply pathways are identified, including expanded use of the Private Rental Sector, Housing Association involvement, adaptations of the Local Authority Housing Fund, using revenue pressures to leverage third-party capital, demountable homes on meanwhile land, and short-term structured rent models. There is also strong cross-sector interest in applying innovations already being used for temporary accommodation - long-lease models, street property acquisitions, and impact capital - to asylum accommodation.
The way forward
This report does not address a complete redesign of the asylum accommodation system. Rather, it proposes a structured, low-risk Regional Integrated Accommodation Pilot (RIAP) commissioned by the Home Office and delivered through one or two combined authority regions, as a practical way to test whether place-based coordination can reduce hotel use, cut costs, and improve outcomes. The current FACT procurement process is a critical window - and one that shouldn't be missed.
A Regional Integrated Accommodation Pilot would explore whether place-based coordination can support the Home Office’s priorities to:
· reduce reliance on contingency accommodation
· reduce costs
· improve outcomes
· strengthen delivery resilience within the framework of the upcoming contracts.
Read the full report for the theory of change, recommendations and steps up unlock action
Download the full ‘Closer To Home’ Report
This work has been funded by Lloyds Bank Foundation and MTVH Migration Foundation.
We invite you to share in what we have heard, consider the recommendations we have made and join us in seeking, enabling or unlocking positive change.