A political row has broken out at Manchester council over the decision
Manchester council’s offices in the city centre(Image: LDRS)
A £6m contract to fund housing for unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) in Manchester has been challenged by Reform UK.
Labour-led Manchester council decided on the five-year contract, worth £1.2m a year, to pay for bookings for a total of 55 flats in supported living accommodation. The flats are for UASC who are aged 16 and older, as well as care leavers who used to have UASC status.
The council has a legal duty to accommodate all looked-after children in its care, and the contract is subsidised by the government through a grant.
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But the group of seven Reform UK councillors in Manchester decided to ‘call in’ the contract decision for further debate. It means the decision will face extra scrutiny before it can proceed. This is expected to happen in July.
Manchester council’s website stated the flats would be ‘in addition to supporting our UASC through the immigration process, and bidding on Manchester Move for social housing once status is confirmed.’
Councillor Sian Astley, leader of Manchester council’s Reform UK group, said: “For a council which has over 20,000 households on the Manchester housing register, all desperately waiting for social housing, to propose spending £1.2m per annum on specialist single person homes for what appear to be unvetted, undocumented asylum seeking men seemed to the team at Reform UK to be something which deserves scrutiny, rather than being a delegated decision no-one ever notices.
“Section 23C of the Children Act 1989 was supposed to help British care-leaver children – it is being utilised to pay for 55 units, with 49 of them currently occupied by men over 18, fully supported to pass through the asylum process with personal advisors into band 1 status for social homes or full support into the PRS with furniture packages and tenancy help.
“The British public are sick to death of being kept at the back of the queue by people who’ve been in this country for five minutes, regardless of their back story. Fairness and equality of provision is essential in social housing, and this is exactly the sort of scheme which our councillors were elected to ask for assessment of and to challenge.”
There are seven Reform UK councillors in Manchester(Image: Declan Carey / Local Democracy Reporting Service)
People who come under band 1 under the council’s housing allocation policy are those described as the ‘highest priority’ for accommodation. Under the policy, band 1 priority is for all care leavers, armed forces leavers and those fleeing domestic abuse.
A council spokesperson said: “A request to ‘call in’ the decision was made by councillors, was within the time limit for such requests to be made and met the criteria. The issues around this decision will therefore be discussed in detail at the next available meeting of the children and young people scrutiny committee.”
Manchester council’s deputy leader, Councillor Tracey Rawlins, said: “As a Labour group, we have always been entirely transparent and open to scrutiny. However, it seems clear that Reform simply don’t understand how local government and housing allocations work.
“The Reform councillors appear to be confusing supported accommodation for vulnerable care leavers as standard social housing to score cheap political points.
“While Reform manufactures division out of a basic legal duty to protect teenagers, Labour is doing the actual work, overseeing a historic reduction in the housing register, and delivering Manchester’s largest affordable housing programme in over 25 years.”