The Home Office informed Safe Haven, which was set up by South Yorkshire Housing Association and Yorkshire Housing Association, that it was not having its housing contract with the National Asylum Support Service (NASS) renewed.
Safe Haven has provided support and accommodation for asylum seekers in the Yorkshire and Humberside region for the last six years. Its current contract with NASS expires in June and it was hoping to be awarded a new one. It has been reported that the contract has instead been awarded to private providers that have not had previous housing agreements with NASS in the region.
The new service providers will have housing responsibility for some 1,500 asylum seekers.
As at the end of September 2005, there were 35,285 asylum seekers in NASS accommodation. With 7,665, Yorkshire and Humber was the region housing the most asylum seekers. The next largest region was the North West with 6,035 asylum seekers accommodated by NASS.
In a speech to NACRO, Junior Housing Minister Baroness Andrews announced that new guidance is to be issued later this year, requiring a more positive attitude by local authorities in meeting their duty to accommodate ex-offenders.
She was critical of any avoidance of duty to prevent homelessness of ex-offenders and signalled a tough line on those authorities that have been flouting legislation introduced in the Homelessness Act 2002. The Act was meant to improve the situation of ex-offenders who were homeless when released from prison. In reality, nationally less than 500 have been re-housed as a priority in the first year after the Act coming into force.
The Junior Housing Minister advised the ODPM and Home Office were working on a revised code of guidance and that it would make clear the responsibility on local authorities to prevent homelessness among offenders released from prison. In particular, it would act to prevent the practice by some councils of rejecting housing applications from ex-offenders on the ground that they had made themselves intentionally homeless.
In a separate development, the Home Office announced it hoped to encourage local authorities to consider housing applications from serving prisoners, as part of its new five-year strategy for reducing re-offending.
The Northern Ireland Housing Executive's annual review of the housing market, found that across Northern Ireland:
There are 15,700 people in urgent need of housing on the social housing waiting list. Between April and September 2005, the number of homeless households increased from 4,244 to 4,782.
Key contributing factors have been rising house prices and a decline in new social housing provision. To illustrate - the 2001 census identified a need for about 1,500 new social homes to be built per year, whereas the actual new build starts each year since then have been less than 60% of the required minimum.