CLOSER TO HOME: IMPROVING THE ASYLUM SYSTEM THROUGH DEVOLUTION
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 Good Faith Partnership and NACCOM - a report that explores the case for, and conditions of, a more devolved approach to asylum accommodation.
The case for change is clear. What started as a contingency measure — housing people seeking asylum in hotels — has become deeply entrenched. It's costly, fragmented, and continues to fail residents, support services and local communities.
This study builds on research conducted with and by 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 problem with the status quo
The UK’s current asylum accommodation system is not fit for purpose. Conceived as a national, privatised dispersal system, it has evolved into a costly, fragmented, and crisis-driven arrangement that fails people seeking asylum, burdens local services, and generates significant public and political harm. The closure of hotels is widely supported but pathways to accelerate equitable dispersal into local communities necessitate increasing the supply of homes across the board, a task well beyond the current asylum system which is demonstrably failing.
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, or explore other blogs.
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.