Conclusion 5

The Home Office does not have adequate safeguards to protect against the risks of vulnerable people having to share accommodation with strangers. The Home Office has written to councils informing them that the number of people staying in hotels will double. It plans to achieve this by making people share rooms. The Home Office said an assessment would be carried out before people are moved into shared rooms, but it struggled to explain what that assessment would consider other than language and nationality. There was no clarity on whether the Home Office planned to consider the trauma that people claiming asylum might have faced and, while the Home Office said it would review health records when we asked about mental health, we are concerned that it does not have a robust process in place to make sure sharing arrangements will be safe. If the Home Office implements room sharing without proper safeguards there could be serious consequences. Recommendation 5: The Home Office should, as part of its Treasury Minute response, set out in detail the measures it will take to identify any vulnerabilities individuals waiting for a decision have, and how it will manage the risks to the individual that these may present.