Here's how Labour can dismantle the hostile environment and end refugee homelessness in 2025

This year made history for all the wrong reasons. In almost 20 years of accommodating and supporting people experiencing homelessness and destitution, NACCOM’s network of frontline charities have never seen a surge in demand for our services quite like this. Let’s call it what it is – a refugee homelessness emergency on an unprecedented scale. 

The No Accommodation Network was born of a need to provide essential support and housing to those at the sharpest end of the UK’s punitive asylum and immigration system. For the most part, people who have had their asylum applications refused – in many cases unjustly – and are forced to experience destitution, isolation and trauma, unable to move forward with their lives. 

2024 is the year that things changed significantly.

• ‘Common sense and humanity’: Home Office doubles time given to refugees before eviction from asylum hotels
• ‘Disgraceful’: Tories condemned for wasting £715m on sending no asylum seekers to Rwanda

The UK charities we work with have supported a record-breaking 4,146 people this year. That’s 11% more people than last year, and 82% more than in 2021/22. For the first time, they collectively provided more than half a million nights of accommodation (501,371) to those in need, 51% more than in 2021-22.  

On top of rising need, our members on the frontline are telling us that the routes into destitution for those in the asylum and immigration system are also broadening. Now, people are being made homeless in increasing numbers after being awarded refugee status, despite the fact that refugees have been granted protection by the state and are eligible for support and housing from local authorities.

NACCOM recorded 1,941 refugee adults who were made homeless in 2023/24 – a huge 99% increase on the year before, and the largest cohort of refugees our network has ever accommodated. On top of that, recent data shows that 850 people were sleeping rough at the point of accessing members’ services, 125% more than last year’s figure.

Meanwhile, 1,257 people with no recourse to public funds (NRPF) were accommodated by NACCOM members this year, showing that hostile environment policies such as NRPF not only push people into hardship, but keep them there. Alarmingly, members were unable to accommodate 4,151 people due to lack of capacity – a staggering increase of 83% which is likely to be a severe underestimation of the true scale of unmet need in the UK.   

Yet all this isn’t an accident. It’s by design.   

Cruel and racist outcomes are not simply a malfunction of the asylum system, but an intended consequence of an ongoing hostile environment for migrants and refugees. This is what the system is programmed to produce. And it is stretching our hardworking charities well beyond their limits.  

Left to pick up the slack, our members are telling us they’re at breaking point, routinely having to buy tents and sleeping bags for people they can’t house because the move to clear a large backlog in claims is dovetailing with the housing crisis, forcing migrants into poverty on a mass scale. It’s heartbreaking having to turn so many people away, knowing they’ll be forced to sleep rough, making them more vulnerable to exploitation and harm. Especially when, in the wake of the far-right riots this summer, people in refugee and asylum communities feel at increased risk of violence. 

So as we head into 2025, is there the political will to do better? 

We’ve welcomed the new government’s swift action in scrapping the inhumane Rwanda scheme and the Bibby Stockholm barge contract, as well as ending the retrospective aspect of the abhorrent Illegal Migration Act. We know things can’t be solved at once, but here’s what the government needs to do in 2025 to start dismantling the toxic hostile environment, and ending homelessness for all. 

First, vital improvements are needed to the move-on process from Home Office accommodation, to stop people being evicted into homelessness. This must include extending the 28-day move-on period to at least 56 days for applicants with both positive and negative decisions. But not only that – it’s critical that people leaving asylum accommodation can access all their necessary documentation at the right time, and that they understand what their rights, responsibilities and options are. Without these changes the system will continue to be a funnel for homelessness.  

Second, it should improve the legal aid system, because everyone should have access to justice to ensure a fair decision on their asylum claim. And third, it urgently needs to lift the ban on the right to work for people seeking asylum so that they can be empowered to live in dignity, as we all wish to do. These steps– along with other policy solutions including tackling the housing crisis – are vital in ending the hostile environment. 

Despite the challenges of 2024, we still have reasons to be hopeful. After all, people experiencing destitution and homelessness hold onto hope and resistance every single day.  

That’s why next year – and every year – we stand in solidarity with people suffering at the hands of our asylum and immigration system to call for systemic change. Everyone deserves to live with dignity and agency as part of their community.  

Let 2025 mark the beginning of the end of the hostile environment, once and for all.

Bridget Young is director of The No Accommodation Network (NACCOM), a UK-wide network bringing an end to destitution amongst people seeking asylum, refugees and migrants with no access to public funds.

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