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ANNEX 1: CURRENT PRACTICE
Introduction
This annex gives brief details of some projects that have been set up to try to address refugee needs. In 2004 and 2005, Michael Bell Associates has undertaken an evaluation of all projects funded under both Challenge Fund and European Refugee Funds according to criteria to measure their relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, outcomes and sustainability. A proportion of the evidence set out below has been drawn from this resource. For the most part, projects have been selected because of their relevance to housing and housing support services. These examples are not comprehensive
The Projects
Coordination of Support
The European Commission funded ATLAS Partnership in Glasgow, which is coordinated by the Council, comprises over 30 agencies undertaking activities that aim to develop skills in asylum seekers ready for the job market once they receive positive decisions on their status. An evaluation report conducted by Michael Bell Associates on the activities of the programme found that the Steering Group approach and regular information bulletins to members had been successful in ensuring a clear focus was maintained on shared goals, notwithstanding the complexity and size of the undertaking.
"The Partnership approach has significantly added value to the sum of the projects' activities. A vibrant network of organisations dedicated to the social and economic advancement of asylum seekers and refugees in collaboration with local authority has been established in a remarkably short time period. Productive relationships within and outside the Partnership and led to joint working and additional "non-EQUAL" funding for services. The informality and positive "can do" attitude of the Partnership's membership has helped this process.11"
Clearly, local arrangements will vary depending on the extent of the refugee population and the number of agencies involved in their support. Where a need is locally identified, a forum which meets on at least a quarterly basis with involvement from the local authority's main service departments, relevant voluntary sector agencies and the police, which works to an agreed plan, is recommended as a minimum.
Orientation
Glasgow City Council12, in providing 2500 units of accommodation to asylum seekers on behalf of NASS has developed a holistic service that provides for more than the basic needs of food and shelter.
"A freephone telephone number is now available to asylum seekers and refugees living in the Glasgow area to provide information on a range of services and local resources including language classes, childcare, social and leisure activities. In addition, Asylum in Glasgow is part of the 3rd Party Reporting scheme co-ordinated by Strathclyde Police," states the Asylum in Glasgow web-site.
Asylum seekers and refugees are also provided with an on-line welcome pack 13 upon arrival in Glasgow, covering essential information, advice and services with the numbers of free phone advice lines in relevant community languages.
A more comprehensive booklet was produced by the British Red Cross14 in Glasgow in cooperation with a number of agencies including the Council. As opposed to guides of its kind found elsewhere, investment was made in producing an attractive format with the assistance of a designer and it contains plenty of photographs and accessible language. It also contains information and advice on housing rights and options and signposts extensively, including to sources of assistance with housing issues. In 2005 the welcome guide was translated into a number of relevant languages. Broad circulation to numerous agencies throughout Glasgow has also raised its profile significantly and it is being used routinely by refugees, as evidenced by staff observation on the street. Feedback generally has been extremely positive and the Red Cross in England is considering replicating its success elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
As previously mentioned, Communities Scotland and the voluntary sector collaborated to produce a template pack to assist local authorities and other providers of services in tailoring advice, information and guidance to refugees. The usefulness of Providing Information to Refugees: A Good Practice Checklist 15 lies in the fact that it allows local authorities to insert local information within an accessible format that has been tested without the need to design materials from scratch.
In Wales, Newport County Borough Council16 has developed a checklist guiding refugees through the range of activities to be undertaken in the transitional period between status being conferred by the Home Office and their finding permanent accommodation. The activities, with linked contact for assistance, include registering with a doctor, opening a bank account, and arranging utilities connections.
Advice and information about the local area, with appropriate concessions made for translation of materials, has been proved anecdotally to represent a powerful mechanism towards integration. It not only potentially relieves pressure on local authority services but also empowers newly arrived refugees creating a stronger sense of self reliance and allowing informed choices about the services accessed.
Some projects have sought to provide a more active service of orientation to refugees and asylum seekers. In Glasgow, the Gateway Initiative, based in the Gorbals area, aims to engage members of the local community and refugees to provide an effective advocacy service to newly arrived asylum seekers and refugees. The idea is to match both an experienced and inexperienced "peer advocate" who together will be responsible for the service. The asylum seeker or refugee finds in the peer advocates a source of information about the city, a supporter who accompanies him or her to appointments with service providers and a companion who is able to introduce him or her to a social network from which new opportunities for integration arise. Through their enhanced knowledge of the city, refugees can make more informed choices about the type of housing they want to occupy and the areas of the city they would prefer to live.
Strengthening Refugee Communities and Making Services Sensitive
Safe Haven Yorkshire17 was set up as a joint venture between two housing associations. It obtained a NASS contract to provide housing and support services for asylum seekers in Yorkshire and Humberside. Most of the housing is leased from private sector landlords, with Safe Haven providing health and safety checks, management services and support to residents including advice on maintaining tenancies, signposting and use of appliances.
It recruited staff from among refugee and migrant communities in the area, and also made a firm commitment to sub-contracting services to local refugee community organisations. Its project workers developed the community organisations' capacity in delivering housing management support through training and other activities. This led to the groups being successful in contracting for services with other providers.
Safe Haven has built upon this success by extending its activities through setting up the Community Housing and Inclusion project ( CHIP) in Hull, Sheffield and Leeds. Again, the overall aim is to promote and facilitate the integration of refugees into mainstream society through making available good quality housing and support services and through support of community development to ensure that the appropriate cultural, social and community links are available to refugees.
Safe Haven seeks to do more than provide a housing support service, vitally important though that function is in ensuring that refugees maintain their tenancies and integrate successfully. Its focus on strengthening the local refugee community, individually through staff recruitment and provision of volunteering opportunities and collectively through partnership with relevant support organisations, addresses refugee concerns that the authorities lack an understanding of their experiences and sensitivity to their needs, cultural and linguistic. This type of project could be more appropriate in areas with a larger concentration of refugees. However, even where refugees are fewer in number local authorities and other agencies ought to maximise opportunities to make housing and housing support services more "refugee friendly". They should also investigate ways of strengthening the capacity of individual representatives within refugee communities to provide support themselves or offer consultancy to the local authority on tailoring services to refugees.
As local authority homelessness strategies are developed across Scotland, they may provide practical examples of the ways in which these recommendations may be put into action by different authorities and in different contexts.
Managing Transition from NASS Accommodation and Early Integration
Migrant Helpline - Moving On18 recruits and trains specialist staff to provide a casework type move on service for refugees in Kent. These include packages of support for those with special needs, women and children. Often the emphasis is on securing employment and work has been undertaken with local employers who are prepared to offer placements. However, the project acknowledges that to contribute to long term successful integration a casework service must address issues holistically so also offers a signposting and information service on the major housing providers and the processes involved.
The Refugee and Asylum Seekers Advice Project provides an early benefits and housing advice service, coordinating with other agencies in reporting to local authorities and other statutory bodies on ways that service delivery to refugees can be improved. "In its first year of operation (2003/04), RASAP opened over 450 cases and obtained more than £500,000 in benefits for its users. 19"
Newcastle City Council also runs a Move On Project, supported by the Challenge Fund. This seeks to apply lessons learned from working with all tenants to develop a new service to ease the transition from and into housing provided by the council, private rented sector and local housing associations.
Accommodating Refugees
The Praxis Hosting Scheme is a community-based temporary accommodation service for London's asylum seekers and refugees.
"Placing separated young people and single adults in local family homes, it draws upon the goodwill and experience which exists within our communities.
With increasing pressure on local authority housing stock, and asylum seekers and other homeless people placed in crowded and poor quality hostels, the Hosting Scheme offers an alternative with both social and economic benefits."20
A hosting scheme has the potential for providing a cost effective option for local authorities, especially where refugees are young or single - host families are paid for board and lodging. The Praxis experience also demonstrates, from its own evaluation with users of the service, that such a service has done much to provide a safe and welcoming environment within which refugees can begin to rebuild their lives. Smaller communities, possibly in rural areas, may also have unfounded fears allayed and achieve better integration through the involvement of local people.
Leicester City Council in 2003/04 ran a pilot project to enable refugees in NASS contracted accommodation owned by the council to stay there, simply switching the funding streams within the local authority and offering a replacement unit for the NASS contract where appropriate. This also enables the local authority to control numbers in terms of total throughput. This is obviously preferable to some refugees but not others and given the changes in the Code of Guidance local authorities should not compel refugees to remain in properties they have occupied temporarily against their will.
Refugee Housing Support Services
Positive Action in Housing21, based in Glasgow, is "a Scottish wide minority-ethnic led charity whose mission is to work with communities and others to enable everyone to have an equal chance to live in good quality, affordable and safe homes, free from discrimination and the fear of racial harassment and violence". The organisation is responsible for the Refugee Aid Project. The Project provides free clothing, blankets and other essential items to newly arrived asylum seekers and refugees.
Funding under the Supporting People initiative may also be needed to ensure that refugees are able to access the help, support and advocacy required to maintain whatever accommodation they obtain. Some early statistics 22 on the use refugees make of Supporting People schemes indicates that many refugees are accessing services through non-statutory routes such as family and friends. It is therefore very important that local authorities have good information about what is available and that this is accessible to all.
Many of the projects below use Supporting People funding to provide essential support and help in setting up and maintaining a tenancy. An example of a Scottish council doing this for all tenants at risk, which may include refugees, is East Ayrshire23.
"Support is provided at a range of levels and the nature and intensity of the support is flexible and tailored to the needs of the person. On average, support hours range from three hours a day to one visit a week. However, at a time of crisis, entire days can be spent with someone. The amount or length of the support provision balances out at about 50% of service users needing less than 16 hours of support in total, and a similar number needing 16 hours or more. The team also encourage people to keep in contact even when their case is closed. The main types of support required include help with benefits, form completion, home making skills, personal budgeting, advocacy and accessing other services."
372 people were helped in the first year, from two offices each staffed by 13 people: a coordinator, support workers and an administrator. The support workers may be based elsewhere, in health services or hostels, for example. The service is open to people referred by other services and those who contact it directly, and operates across all tenures 24.
Dudley MBC Refugee Support Service uses Supporting People funding to develop "floating support" services for refugees to assist with their inclusion in everyday community life in the area. This has an important place in the Dudley Supporting People shadow strategy 25. Floating Support services involve a proactive approach to advice and information services on an outreach basis. They are flexible enough to adapt to different venues and communities and usually are staffed by experienced advice or support workers with access to laptop computers.
The Holy Cross Centre Trust St Pancras Refugee Centre in London provides housing advice and support to refugees. It aims to improve and maintain refugees' housing conditions, assisting them to access statutory rights, find suitable accommodation and maintain their tenancies through resettlement work and on-going tenancy support. Many of their users suffer from physical and mental health problems and they have an effective network of agencies for referral or joint work.
The Liverpool Family Service Unit Integrating Families focuses on the needs of refugee families whose integration may be threatened by family problems. Apart from developing a project that aims to benchmark such services in Liverpool and provide a model of good practice across the United Kingdom, they aim to prevent family breakdown by offering practical family support, advice, peer support from volunteer mentors, access to other services and nursery provision to support access to training and employment.
Cardiff City Council works with two voluntary sector organisations locally to operate the Refugee Housing Advice Project, with the aim of encouraging refugees to stay in Cardiff by enabling them to find stable housing and then employment. The emphasis is on practical support to assist gaining and maintaining tenancies e.g. the provision of benefits advice, liaison with the Housing Benefit Department and advice on payment of rent. For refugees who rent in the private sector, its officers liaise with the local bond board which is responsible for arranging non cash rent guarantees with quality assured landlords, overcoming the many difficulties refugees have in ready access to finance.
Refugee Housing Association26 was set up in 1957 and is now part of the Metropolitan Housing Trust Group. Working in three regions in England, in South Yorkshire it runs floating support schemes in Sheffield, Rotherham and Doncaster in partnership with local authorities and local agencies, supporting over 180 refugee households, including families. It also developed the country's first ever 'refugee foyer', linking housing with education, training and employment services and with an emphasis on integration into the local community.
Each of the projects described above offers intensive support and advice, often linked to accommodation, in order to enable the new refugee to access and maintain accommodation and start using other services. Some of the assistance provided is via outreach sessions and home visits, an acknowledgement that refugees will have disrupted lives and may find it impossible to attend scheduled appointments.
Settlement
Not all refugees in Scotland will have arrived as asylum seekers. Scotland needs new workers and new skills and refugees may provide these, coming to the area to settle from other areas within the United Kingdom. Starting as they do with very few resources, the aim must be that refugees in Scotland achieve integration: that they are, in effect, in the same housing position as other workers, other tenants, other home owners, other Scots. Few projects focus on such longer term aims, since most have been forced to deal with the succession of emergencies and short term measures created by refugee arrivals and the gaps in the systems to receive them. Praxis27, in London, has conducted some secondary research reviewing the housing position of refugees and relating it to needs and aspirations in the longer term, but it has yet to be published.
Some research has focused on the role played by refugee run organisations in securing long term integration, and some local services focus on this as well 28. Most such organisations are small, often under-resourced, and may need assistance to enable them to participate even in local consultative mechanisms. As local authorities develop housing strategies and seek to include refugee needs and aspirations in them, consulting refugees among the other potential users may prove more difficult. This may also focus attention on the participation of refugees in civic life more generally and in local consultation and decision-making processes more specifically. Some projects address the need to build up and develop refugee-led organisations.
The North of England Refugee Service29 was established as an independent charitable organisation in 1989. It operates a local NASS contract but has wider aims of acting as an agent of positive change in promoting social inclusion, integration and participation. It set up the first Regional Refugee Forum in the UK in 2001 and has supported many community organisations in their development.
The Scottish Refugee Council has started similar work in community development 30, funded by the ERF. Refugee Housing Association (see above) has a community development project in the East Midlands supported by the ERF to build capacity and fundraise for refugee organisations in the region.
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