Preventing rough sleeping after asylum decisions — by Bill Tidnam
20 February 2026
Our Chief Executive reflects on the the gaps between asylum decisions and homelessness prevention
A few months ago, I joined an outreach shift with Boni, from one of our outreach teams. This was a bit different from many of the shifts that we do, in a suburban area much removed from the conventional city-street images of rough sleeping.
We started early in the morning to make sure we met people before they left their sleep sites. The nature of the area meant that there were fewer people sleeping in very public places outside shops or offices, and more people hidden away in empty buildings or sleeping in their cars; although, as is often the case, we spent a lot of time in multi-storey car parks. Probably there were fewer people who knew who we were as outreach workers than in inner London, and perhaps fewer people who thought of themselves as sleeping rough.
We started in the dark and checked a derelict telephone exchange and a boarded-up care home, found someone well known to the team who was bedded down outside a health centre and who agreed to meet my outreach colleague at a local day centre later in the day to try to find temporary accommodation. We visited a railway station, where people were known to sleep rough and where the staff were sympathetic, sometimes ignoring their lack of tickets. There was no one there today.
As dawn was breaking, we slithered through the mud into an abandoned playing field sandwiched between a main road and a railway. Pylons carried electricity cables above us. The road had a couple of hotels on it, now apparently largely used to house people seeking asylum who were waiting for a decision on their case. There was a derelict pavilion, broken and graffitied, but empty, and we were about to return to our car when we smelt wood smoke.
Farid’s story
It was difficult to see where this was coming from, but on the other side of the field was a brick hut, and it was there, in a structure that was part pillbox, part tent, that we met Farid*. Farid had his few possessions around him and was keeping the autumnal chill at bay with a small fire, which he was feeding with twigs and small branches from the surrounding scrubland. His English wasn’t great, but we established that he spoke Farsi and that until a few days before he had lived in one of the hotels on the nearby road, placed there by the Home Office while they reviewed his asylum claim. When he was granted leave to remain, he was evicted — with poor English and no knowledge of the system — he had come to the playing field and was staying there, possibly with support from the people who were still in the hostels, but with no idea what to do next.
As someone who works for an organisation whose mission is to end rough sleeping, and who supports successive governments’ commitment to ending it, it’s frustrating to see the actions of government departments directly adding to the problem that they are committed to ending. Farid didn’t have great English, but he was capable and resourceful enough to construct a shelter from unpromising elements and was receptive to our encouragement to meet Boni later in the day to find emergency accommodation as a first step to finding somewhere to live in the long term.
Happily, Farid is now housed, and getting on with his life, but it’s shocking that during his many months in limbo in asylum seekers’ accommodation, no effort was made to prepare him for the next steps to understand how he can find accommodation and sustain a productive life. We understand that there are those who will say that such help merely helps to incentivise those who claim asylum, but without getting into those arguments, it seems perverse to force people into rough sleeping as a result of an acceptance that they are indeed in need of asylum. An emergency response — such as that from an outreach team — is likely to be more expensive and less satisfactory than planning for a likely outcome, in this case a positive asylum decision.
The new government Homelessness Strategy, A national plan to end homelessness, which was published in December, recognises that the asylum system is an important driver of rough sleeping and talks about better co-ordination between the Home Office and local councils, and other administrative improvements. More significantly, it talks about early targeted advice and guidance, and pilots of a more effective approach aimed at making sure that people have the tools they need to avoid homelessness and destitution.
We welcome these initiatives and agree that the way forward needs to prioritise prevention, particularly for a group that is so easy to identify and whose rough sleeping is so entirely predictable.
*Not his real name
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