Outreach

Outreach teams engaging with people seeking asylum will need to be equipped to help service users with a broad variety of challenges: from accessing an Aspen finance card through to signposting people toward specialist advice and support. It is essential that strategic leads look to compose teams bringing together a variety of skillsets. Where possible, recruiting staff with lived experience as a person seeking asylum or refugee can also provide important understanding and insight to a team.

Recruitment

Participants in the Design Lab stressed the importance of emphasising in a job description that prospective outreach workers have experience ‘dealing with ambiguous situations, demonstrating resilience, and readily adapting to change in emerging situations’, to source personnel with a background in handling rapidly-changing policy environments. Similarly, their recruitment stresses that job requirements may flex and change over time.

Multilingual staff

Not all outreach staff need to be multilingual, however it is beneficial to recruit team members capable of speaking some of the main languages used by people seeking asylum within the local authority. This helps staff to establish trust with residents at an earlier stage and to respond more swiftly to urgent issues, without requiring an interpreter.

Multidisciplinary teams

• An important lesson shared by local authorities with longer experience engaging in outreach – either with people seeking asylum or other refugee groups – was the added strength of setting up a multidisciplinary outreach team, bringing a range of skills and experience in addressing different areas.
• These teams typically used an early help assessment to identify the needs of asylum seeking families.
• Adults are also signposted towards services with a specialised background in areas such as health, finance, employability, legal advice, trauma-informed mental health support, or housing.

Regular check-in meetings across an outreach team can then ensure that lessons from specialised team members are shared. For example, Newham’s ‘Welcome Newham’ team comprises a series of officers who each act as ‘champions’ in specific areas of expertise:

• Employment
• ESOL
• Benefits
• Housing/homelessness
• Tenancy sustainment
• GP registrations
• Biometric residence permits (BRP)
• Aspen Cards
• Section 95 status
• GP registrations
• School admissions.

The team largely engages in specialised work relating to their designated area, but holds a weekly in-person ‘anchor day’ to update on their caseload, to share learnings and to remain closely aware of the complex challenges and issues facing people seeking asylum in different areas of their lives.

Data can be a helpful tool for local authorities to gain insights on their local population and to cater services based on observed needs. A key consideration that should be made when gathering and sharing data, and should underpin all aspects of this work, is appropriate GDPR compliance.

In contingency accommodation

• London’s contracted asylum accommodation provider Clearsprings Ready Homes (CRH) maintains a data portal with basic information on the residents of a contingency hotel. This can be used to establish data on the profile and demographics of asylum-seeking residents, and in certain cases individual data on arrivals. Local authorities should liaise with senior contacts at CRH to ensure they have suitable arrangements in place that enable the maximum sharing of data. Please note, CRH will ask officers to sign a Memorandum of Understanding and will only grant access to the portal to officers with a valid user case.
• However, when using the portal, local authorities should be mindful that there is a high level of population churn among asylum-seeking residents, where people will move between boroughs or in and out of London, particularly when they are provided with dispersal accommodation or acquire refugee status. As such portal data should be seen as approximate, rather than accurate.

• Another simple yet effective method for data collection can be for outreach staff to visit new arrivals through door-knocking exercises, to disseminate basic data sharing forms that enable a local authority to build a file of a person’s name, data of birth, door number, country of origin, and disabilities or health vulnerabilities. These simpler data collection exercises can be integrated into existing outreach, orientation or early help meetings. Short, accessible forms can include simple GDPR explanations to obtain service user consent for storing personal data.

In dispersal accommodation

Local authorities receive comparatively less data from central government or contracted accommodation providers on residents in dispersed accommodation. This is changing however: Clearsprings Ready Homes began uploading the addresses of dispersed accommodation onto its portal in October 2023.

Boroughs in the Design Lab with larger numbers of residents in dispersed accommodation had found a number of alternative routes to build up data on the whereabouts and needs of people seeking asylum, whilst remaining compliant with GDPR and maintaining the trust of asylum-seeking residents. These included the following methods:

1. VCS Organisations. Firstly, many had worked in collaboration or partnership with local VCS organisations delivering immediate aid to people seeking asylum. These tended to have strong relations of trust with asylum seeking residents that, over time, had enabled them to gather data on the whereabouts of dispersed accommodation sites. Some local authorities had shadowed VCS organisations on door-knocking drop-in exercises to introduce themselves and ask about gathering data. Others such as Barnet had directly commissioned and funded VCS organisations with relevant expertise and community trust to deliver local authority outreach work.
2. Engaging residents through trusted spaces. Some of the boroughs in the Design Lab had looked to reach and engage residents of dispersed accommodation through holding outreach ‘drop in’ sessions, hosted in community spaces often visited by people seeking asylum: such as foodbanks and warm banks, community hubs and kitchens.
3. Housing department data. Some boroughs had been able to obtain partial data on the postcodes of dispersed accommodation through their housing department, on postcodes and the numbers of residents, where House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) licenses had been issued for asylum accommodation.
4. Home Office secondments. One borough in the Design Lab – Barking and Dagenham – had successfully applied to the Home Office to second a member of staff into the local authority team. This service was funded by the Local Authority at the time. The member of staff assisted with mapping dispersed accommodation and liaising across central and local government to share information. This proved to have been particularly useful as part of a broader strategy for the borough to move its community services closer to areas with dispersed accommodations sites. Other local authorities with a large population of residents in dispersed accommodation may wish to inquire about the potential for similar arrangements. However, local authorities will typically be expected by the Home Office to resource the staff costs for the secondment.

Further resources

In addition to providing data as set out above, the Greater London Authority hosts the London Migration Data Hub. The tool sets out a number of migration and housing pressures/populations in each local authority with the aim of:

• facilitating the implementation of a ‘fair shares’ approach across London to support people seeking sanctuary,
• informing the development and funding of services to maximise opportunities for support and social integration available across populations.

 The Data Hub also includes interactive maps on the asylum-seeking population, numbers of Afghan evacuees in settled accommodation, Ukrainian arrivals under Homes for Ukraine and homelessness in the boroughs.

If you have not yet accessed the Data Hub, please first create an account on the London Datastore. Once registered, email [email protected] to gain access.

Outreach teams should look to familiarise themselves with the key requirements of the Asylum Accommodation and Support (AASC) contract. This is the contract that Clearsprings Ready Homes holds in London. Understanding the contract will help teams to identify the services that Clearsprings Ready Homes and its subcontractors should be offering and to spot any potential gaps or poor-quality provision on the ground, when engaging in outreach.

The objective of the Home Office through the AASC contracts is to "meet the accommodation and essential living needs of eligible asylum seekers”.Reference:1 Asylum Matters have produced a concise document of the services that this should comprise and the expected quality of delivery. This also includes information on the Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility Contract (AIRE) for the Home Office’s contracted advice provider Migrant Help.

A core role of an outreach team is to build trust with people seeking asylum to engage with and utilise local authority services. People apply for asylum in the UK for a diverse array of reasons, and their journey through the asylum system can be very different, but many can feel a sense of mistrust and caution towards government, either local or central. For new arrivals, awareness of available entitlements and services will often be low, although our Supporting changing needs page provides advice on how orientation strategies can improve understanding of these. It is crucial that teams proactively approach people seeking asylum, rather than assuming those in need of support will approach a local authority.

In person presence

• Regular, in-person presence and contact with asylum seeking residents is key to the success of gaining trust. This can take different forms, depending on the context and dispersal of asylum-seeking populations in a borough.
  • In person consultations and drop-ins at contingency accommodation where there is a communal space available. 
  • Door-knocking rounds at sites of dispersal accommodation. 
  • Where there is no communal space at a contingency hotel, or where there is limited data on sites of dispersal accommodation, drop-ins can be held in nearby community spaces popular with people seeking asylum, e.g. a local library, community kitchen or co-located with VCS organisations delivering aid.
• For drop-ins, consider setting up a welcoming environment – for example with teas and coffees – to invite participants in. Having interpreters on site proficient in the main languages spoken at a site is also crucial for those with emerging levels of English.
• Regularity is important with drop-ins and face-to-face meetings: aim to be available consistently at the same day and time in each venue, and where possible ensure the same staff attend each time to establish recognition among residents.

Navigating barriers and concerns

There is no one form of ‘best practice’ for establishing the trust of people seeking asylum. However, there are a number of tips that can help residents feel more at ease engaging with the council.

• Where boroughs are engaging in outreach for the first time, it can be helpful to shadow or work in collaboration with VCS organisations who have a longer track record and stronger relations with local asylum-seeking residents. This can help gently establish awareness about the role and presence of a local authority – bridged through trusted community practitioners.
• Set clear expectations about what services the local authority can and cannot provide: to outline entitlements available, but also to be transparent about where alternative sources of support are required. 
• Where possible, engage in outreach work in pairs with a man and a woman. Oftentimes women seeking asylum may be more comfortable with a female member of staff. 
• Liaise with contingency accommodation staff to understand who is not approaching a drop-in. Staff may be able to identify at-risk individuals, who may require a different approach such as door-knocking, or engagement via a VCS partner. 
• Communication is key. Maintain regular communication with residents on any actions agreed and delivered, to demonstrate that their concerns have been heard and action taken and reinforce who they can turn to for support.