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Home Office cancels plan to scrap housing protections for asylum seekers
The Home Office has cancelled plans to remove housing protections for asylum seekers.
Under the policy, landlords accommodating asylum seekers would no longer have to follow houses in multiple occupation (HMO) regulations, including fire safety standards.
Landlords would have been allowed to house asylum seekers for two years without obtaining an HMO licence. The government had argued this would increase the amount of housing available to asylum seekers.
The draft regulations were put forward in March 2023 by former home secretary Suella Braverman and had already partly made their way through parliament, but they were challenged by eight asylum seekers in a judicial review. An hour before the trial was due to start, the Home Office cancelled the policy.
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In May 2023, 137 organisations including the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), Crisis, Shelter, the Refugee Council and Amnesty International urged the government to abandon the plans. Gavin Smart, chief executive of the CIH, said HMO licences “are designed to keep people safe, especially safe from fire”, adding: “They need to apply to everyone.”
Documents disclosed in the course of the case showed that housing secretary Michael Gove had expressed opposition to the plans in November 2022. In a letter to the prime minister, he wrote that “there is a significantly higher risk of fire in HMOs” and the move risked “incentivising lower-quality housing”.
In December, the Home Office backed down over another change to asylum support after councils said it contributed to a sharp rise in the number of homeless refugees.
Jeremy Bloom, a solicitor at Duncan Lewis Solicitors, who led the claimants’ legal team for the judicial review, said the Home Office’s withdrawal was “a spectacular u-turn”.
He added: “The claimants now have the enduring protection that they will not be placed in accommodation which does not meet licensing standards, which are so vital to fire safety and to prevent overcrowding.”
Mary Atkinson, campaign officer at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said the government had “bowed to pressure over their obscene proposals, which would have left some of the most marginalised people in our society at risk in unsafe housing”.
She said: “Instead of treating people seeking sanctuary as second-class citizens, the government must act to quickly and fairly process asylum claims, and make sure local authorities are properly resourced to provide safe housing.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is longstanding government policy that we do not routinely comment on individual cases.
“If an individual does not have the right to be in the UK, we will make every effort to return to their country of origin or a safe third country.”
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