The decision has been welcomed by organisations that support refugees, but they argue that it needs to be made permanent.
The government has extended the amount of time newly-recognised refugees have to find suitable accommodation, increasing the period from 28 days to 56 days.
Currently, once people receive an asylum decision, they have 28 days to leave Home Office accommodation and arrange alternative housing, as outlined in the Asylum Support (Amendment) Regulations 2002.
According to government letters seen by the BBC, the Home Office has called the change “an interim measure” as it tries to grapple with the asylum backlog and manage the transition from physical biometric residence permits to digital eVisas.
A Home Office spokesperson said: ‘We have inherited enormous pressures in the asylum system and remain absolutely committed to ending the use of hotels as we ramp up returns of failed asylum seekers.’
The 56-day move-on period will remain in place until June 2025, when it will be reassessed.
The charity Homeless Link described the pilot as ‘a really welcome step’, for which it had been campaigning, but said it would like to see the change made permanent.
Homeless Link’s director of social change, Fiona Colley, said that the change will be “so important in helping prevent homelessness for so many people; greatly reducing the risk of refugees becoming homeless and taking pressure of already overstretched local authority and voluntary and community sector homelessness services”.
The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford reports that the UK’s asylum backlog grew from 27,000 to 132,000 applications between 2018 and 2022.
In 2023, the Home Office substantially increased the number of staff handling asylum claims to address the growing backlog.
By 31 December 2023, the total number of asylum applications awaiting an initial decision stood at around 95,000.
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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