Our housing system is broken for refugees

It was a Wednesday morning last year in August, when I turned up to work to find that everything had changed overnight. My team and I were unable to keep up with the number of calls and emails and people were knocking at the office door. We were inundated, and simply didn't have the resources to cope.

Our work, placing young people at risk of homelessness into emergency accommodation and helping them to access housing services, had become increasingly busy in recent years, but this overnight jump in numbers caught us completely off guard and we weren't prepared. We were forced to turn away more people than we could help.

It became clear that the change in government policy, hastily implemented to clear a backlog of open asylum cases, had not only fast-tracked more cases than usual, but dramatically reduced the time that an asylum seeker is given to leave their Home Office accommodation once their status is settled. They now had as few as seven days instead of 28 to find alternative accommodation, which is significantly shorter than the 56 days that the Homeless Reduction Act of 2017 recommends for finding accommodation.

The chaos that resulted was an almost 234 per cent increase in refugees sleeping rough on the streets of London and a deluge of referrals we were struggling to place. Across the country referrals to our Nightstop service were up by 65 per cent. Most of the refugees we see don’t have family or friends in the UK, they have not been allowed to work and English is not their first language, making accessing local support services incredibly tough. Most are unaware that they are entitled to help.

The people who turn up on our doorstep are exhausted, drained of hope and desperate. It was heart breaking that there was only so much that we could do. We turned away one woman in January who had been sleeping on the streets for days and was so cold she could no longer feel her hands. All we could do was give her a cup of tea and some warm clothes to wear. It was devastating for the whole team.

Thankfully, the government eventually reversed their eviction notice period in December 2023, but the urgency to clear the backlog has remained. There are more refugees than before who need urgent support with their housing. For those we can support, we help them to claim housing benefits, which is a six-week to eight-week process, as well as helping to find emergency and supported accommodation, but this is not a long-term solution.

A further issue we find is that when the housing support does kick in, it’s almost impossible to find a private landlord in London willing to take the risk. This leaves refugees with newly settled status in limbo, unable to privately rent and forced by necessity to take up valuable bed space in supported accommodation. For those not lucky enough to have found help, living on the streets is the only other option, which leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and criminalisation.

Unfortunately, while the government has attempted to solve the backlog of asylum cases, it has simply moved the problem around, and there is now a further increase in homelessness and a necessity for housing. For local authorities who fund services like ours, this puts a huge strain on their finances. There are a growing number of young people at risk of homelessness because of oversubscribed services.

There were times when we felt completely powerless, but I remain proud of the work that we did, and our ability to adapt in order to support people. What is needed now is a further change in government policy, the implementation of a 56-day eviction notice period, and a plan for those leaving Home Office care. This would give refugees a fair chance to start a new life, easing the pressure on the homelessness sector and local authorities to find more beds at a time when demand is already far outstripping supply.

Jake Johnstone heads Nighstop in London, an emergency accommodation service for young people at risk of homelessness. 

You can find out more by visiting www.depaul.org.uk/nightstop