Britain was meant to be supporting fleeing Ukrainians. Instead, we’re failing them
Ukraine may be enjoying success on the battlefield, but displaced Ukrainians in the UK face renewed trauma. The Homes for Ukraine scheme, which has housed more than 100,000 people in Britain since the start of the war, is now at risk of collapse. Without early and drastic intervention, the scheme will compound rather than ease the suffering of the Ukrainian families it was meant to help.
The single biggest problem with the scheme is that it was drawn up with a six-month time limit attached, and the war has been going on for nine months. That means families reaching the end of the allotted period face a cliff-edge where essential support can suddenly stop, with no alternatives in place. By mid-October this year, nearly a third of displaced Ukrainian families were approaching the end of their hosting arrangements. When placements have ended, local and central government officials have told many displaced Ukrainians that they should look for new accommodation on the local private housing market, perfectly aware that letting agencies demand security and credit histories that people who have been subsisting in the country for only six months will find impossible to provide. Some local authorities advise that the only way to access further support is to deliberately make Ukrainian mothers and children homeless – which makes little sense, given that emergency housing is much more expensive than hosting arrangements.
That approach isn’t universal, and a few local authorities stand out for recognising and addressing the problem. Wiltshire council says it will put down a deposit and the first month’s rent for displaced Ukrainians needing new accommodation – if they can find somewhere they can afford. Bristol City council, meanwhile, offers a rent guarantee to landlords who offer homes to Ukrainians, plus a £1,000 thank-you payment. But other authorities have provided none of this help – leading to inevitable questions over what, exactly, they have done with the funding received from central government to support Ukrainians in their area. After overcoming lengthy delays and impenetrable bureaucracy to be granted a visa to reach the UK, Ukrainians have faced a postcode lottery, with support for the scheme varying hugely across the country. In some areas where government funding hasn’t produced visible benefits for Ukrainians, responses to freedom of information requests for details on how the money has been spent have been vague and incomplete.
In some places, volunteer groups have stepped in to fill the gap. Local church, community and social groups have undertaken extraordinary efforts to help arrivals from Ukraine – and the host families accommodating them – assimilate and overcome the obstacles they face. The local group where I help out as a volunteer, in a rural area of central England, aims to assist displaced Ukrainians navigating their way to integration and independence so they eventually no longer feel the need to visit their drop-in sessions or call on their services. But the road to reach that point is hard, and made harder by a failure of government to live up to its promises.
The language barrier is not the only obstacle displaced Ukrainians have faced in finding work. The scattering of new arrivals across the country has had the positive benefit of distributing them across many receptive communities, instead of creating enclaves in major cities. But this also means many find themselves in rural locations where the only feasible means of accessing work, shopping or services is a car – which is often too expensive. Most of the Ukrainians who have arrived under the scheme are women with children, whose spouses have remained behind for military service. Childcare arrangements, even where they are available, are often prohibitively expensive and rule out full-time work.
Ukrainian children were supposed to have been provided with school places, but this has also been a lottery. Some small local schools have made extraordinary efforts to welcome and accommodate their guests. In other areas, children wait months as one school after another declines to offer them a place, and parents and their hosts wrestle with inflexible and unresponsive local bureaucracy. Again, funding has been provided – an allocation of up to £8,755 per secondary school-age child specifically to cover school places on top of the £10,500 per person allocated for other forms of support.
Hosts also receive a monthly payment intended to cover costs. The refugees minister has conceded that this is wholly inadequate, and deters hosts from signing up. That’s one reason why new hosts are coming forward at a much slower rate than early in the scheme, making it even harder to find options for families whose hosting arrangements have come to an end.
Central government appears to think its job is done, leaving the burden of making the system work to local authorities and volunteer groups. At the scheme’s inception, nobody could have foreseen the duration of the war. But nine months should have been plenty of time to recognise that a longer-term solution was required – especially given the warnings of urgency from those same support groups that have been working on the frontline to fill the many gaps in the current flawed system.
Ukraine’s biggest challenge over the coming winter will be providing essential basic services like heat, light and power to its population, while Russia does its very best to destroy them. The desperate need for safe havens abroad remains, and will continue to do so well into next year, regardless of Ukrainian success on the battlefield. But with the challenges facing displaced Ukrainians in accessing the help and support that they were promised, it is little wonder that some are already giving up on the UK, preferring to take their chances by going back to a war zone. Ukrainians fighting on the frontline look to countries such as the UK to keep their families safe, and a system designed to fail represents a shameful breach of the UK’s promises.
Keir Giles works with the Russia and Eurasia programme of Chatham House; he is the author of Russia’s War on Everybody