Landlords in Dacorum, a district in Hertfordshire neighboring Watford, are being offered £7,000 to allow their properties to be used for accommodating asylum seekers, a council housing chief has said.
Natasha Beresford, strategic director for housing at Dacorum Borough Council, told a parliamentary select committee last week (April 29) that landlords in the area “are being directly proposed and offered incentives of £7,000 per property”.
Companies including Serco and Clear Springs Ready Homes have contracts with the Home Office to provide accommodation for asylum seekers. Ms Beresford, who was also speaking as vice chair of the East of England asylum governance group, raised concerns that the way in which asylum accommodation is handled is leading to prices being driven up.
In 2023/24, the Home Office spent £4.7bn on asylum support, including £3.1bn on hotels, and accommodation across the country now costs an average of £41,000 per person per year. Ms Beresford said: “Costs are very much likely to have significantly risen because of the incentives that are being provided and paid to landlords. Local authorities aren’t able to compete in that market.”
Market inflation is “directly contributing to homelessness” by making it harder for local authorities to work with the private sector to help combat the problem, Ms Beresford said. She was speaking to the Home Affairs select committee, which is carrying out an inquiry into asylum seeker accommodation to look at how the system operates and what changes could be made to improve it.
Ms Beresford also told the select committee that security staff at one hotel for asylum seekers in Dacorum have had to call police because “they needed help, they couldn’t contain and manage the situation”. Police in the borough have “had to be drawn into very, very difficult discussions which have been protracted and drawn out over months, many months”, Ms Beresford said.
She said there were “significant issues in relation to impacts around mental health, threats to kill, serious incidents and use of weapons, [and] concerns from residents on site that unreasonable force is often used by members of security when dealing with incidents on site”.
According to Ms Beresford, the Home Office has been “very slow” in dealing with issues such as “community cohesion” and anti-social behaviour, even when information shared with them has been “overwhelming” and included police logs detailing “the volume of attendance” at the site.
“Mitigations provided on site were provided by the two-tier local authorities rather than the provider and the Home Office themselves, and it took several months before Home Office teams and the managing directors of the providers … actually visited the site to inspect for themselves.”
At the end of 2024, more than 250 asylum seekers were being accommodated at hotels in Dacorum. Safeguarding concerns were a repeated theme in Ms Beresford’s evidence to the select committee.
She said it had taken “four months of asking” to see a training pack given to staff at asylum seeker accommodation in Dacorum, but the pack had been “for a site not within our region [and] for a different provider”.
“When engaging with officers working on the ground, they couldn’t clearly indicate to you what their safeguarding escalating arrangements were and what their protocol would be in a serious incident,” Ms Beresford said.
She warned that at the hotel in Dacorum where police have had to be called, the council was still not happy with safeguarding and training arrangements five months after concerns were raised with the Home Office.
“[There is] often a significant time delay and in some cases somebody is in crisis before those referrals and relevant arrangements are stood up. Individuals have been hospitalised because those delays have not been acted upon.”
And Ms Beresford concluded: “In Hertfordshire … what we see are several hotels being utilised as feeder hotels [for people who are about to have a decision made on their asylum claim], where funding is provided by bed space rather than by individuals.
“There is a significant churn in respect of individuals adding pressure to the system and what that does – particularly in the case of large volumes of single males – [is it] increases pressures on night shelters [and] other food bank provision.
“We’re also seeing growing pressures in relation to community cohesion and modern slavery.”
The duty to house successful asylum seekers rests with the local authority where they are based when their application is approved. Funding by bedspace rather than by people means that a local authority may receive the same funding per year for one bedspace, regardless of whether it is used by one person or four different people, all of whom may have different needs.
Covering Hertfordshire’s district and borough councils.
