The Home Office has created a stock of 16,000 properties for refugees, despite a serious housing shortage for young workers and families.
Contractors working for the Home Office are offering landlords five-year guaranteed full leases to take over the management of properties as they race to move asylum seekers out of hotels.
Properties from the private rental and social housing markets are used to house more than 58,000 refugees in England, Wales and Scotland; this is twice the number in areas labeled “dispersed accommodation” a decade ago.
The Home Office is expanding the use of rental accommodation to meet Rishi Sunak’s pledge to reduce hotel use, which costs up to £8 million a day, insiders said. Fifty shelter hotels were planned to be closed by the end of last month, and 50 more in the spring.
Until the end of last year, there were nearly 50 thousand refugees in 400 hotels paid for by taxpayers. Keeping asylum seekers in dispersed accommodation can cost as little as £30 per day, compared to £150 per day for hotels.
But experts advising the Home Office have warned that local families and young workers are in danger of being locked out of cheaper rental accommodation.
A Home Office insider said: “The ministry’s strong preference is for dispersed accommodation because it is much cheaper and much more discreet than hotels. That doesn’t mean it isn’t popular.
“Some developers are buying properties on fairly normal streets. You could buy yourself a house worth £300,000 and suddenly find that next door is a house full of refugees. As a result, MPs start reporting problems.
‘Creating ghettos’ plan
“It is also densely clustered in places like Hull, Bradford and Teesside where property is cheap. “It’s potentially damaging to these places because it creates ghettos that are terrible for integration.”
The Telegraph understands that up to 30,000 properties may be needed to end hotel use unless the Government can significantly reduce the backlog of 100,000 asylum seekers awaiting a decision on whether they can remain in the country.
“There’s a move away from hotels to putting people into housing, which on one level is not a bad idea, but on another level, at the scale at which it’s being done, it’s going to have a pretty significant impact on the areas where it’s being done. at scale,” the insider said.
“This makes 16,000 properties available to families who would otherwise be looking for somewhere to rent and live, often looking to get off the local housing register.”
The number of people registered on municipal waiting lists increased from 1.19 million in 2020-21 to 1.2 million at the end of 2021-22.
The contractors behind the scheme – Serco, Clearsprings and Mears – were paid £4bn over 10 years to provide accommodation for asylum seekers.
Serco advertises its benefits to landlords as five-year leases where “rent is paid in full, on time, every month, without delay”, as well as full repairs and maintenance, excluding structural defects.
Utility and council tax bills are also paid under contracts that offer “Complete Homes with Multi-Occupation and property management” and have no rental or management costs.
With more than a third of UK landlords falling into rent arrears each year, a housing expert close to the project said the deals were extremely attractive. “If you were the landlord, wouldn’t you make a five-year contract where they would pay the full rent?” they said.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We continue to work across government and with local authorities to identify a range of accommodation options to reduce the unacceptable use of hotels, which costs £8 million per day. The government is engaging with local authorities and key stakeholders as part of this process.” “He remains determined to pass.”
The spokesman declined to comment on the figures but said: “We are working to ensure sufficient distribution area to meet our legal obligation.”
Enver Solomon, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council, said: “The government’s gross mismanagement of the asylum system has led to massive human misery, with a huge backlog of cases resulting in people being left in limbo for years and billions of dollars being wasted on hotels. and other accommodation.
“This would not have happened if the government had focused on operating a fair, efficient and effective system rather than the Rwanda plan, which would only lead to more costs and chaos.”