Shivering on the floor under a bunk bed in a men’s hostel, Yulia remembered the Russian bombs falling on Kyiv and tried to convince herself that coming to London was a good idea.
She had arrived four months earlier when a friend of a friend, a man in his thirties, had offered to become her sponsor under the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. But their relationship had broken down.
“He would dump wet clothes from the washing machine on my bed, eat my food and turn off the hot water if I spent too long in the bathroom,” she told The Times, requesting not to use her last name. “I asked the council what I should do. They told me they would relocate me to social housing.”
Yet after she announced that she was moving out, the council did nothing. Desperate to leave, but unable to speak English, she went to work illegally as a pot washer in an Indian restaurant. Other staff felt sorry for her, and sometimes put her up for the night, or sneaked her into their hostel rooms.
Yulia’s correspondence with the council, seen by The Times, highlights how British bureaucracy has failed to respond with urgency to help Ukrainian refugees who fall out with a sponsor and find themselves on the brink of homelessness. In the correspondence, Yulia is addressed as Yassin, her requests for interpretation are ignored, and she is told that to receive assistance she would have to provide documents only a permanent resident would have.
Sunflower Sisters, an organisation that offers Ukrainian women emergency assistance, said councils were not providing an adequate safety net for refugees falling out of sponsorship arrangements. “In most areas, the onus has been placed on the individuals to find their own [new] sponsor or rental property. As they face ‘brick walls’ in the rental market, they are faced with the difficult decision to return,” said Dr Alice Good, the founder of the charity, who has been honoured by the King for her services to Ukrainian refugees.
Even when local authorities do step in to help, that help can be problematic. Families the charity works with have been placed in hotels “for months on end”, with some even reportedly “forced to boil eggs in kettles to ensure their children could eat a hot meal”.
More than 6,000 Ukrainian households in England were owed homelessness relief duty from their local authority in June and 4,200 of these had dependent children, according to the Department for Levelling Up. A spokesman said they would be “raising concerns with the government on the growing number of Ukrainians presenting as homeless to councils”.
As of last month, around 500 Ukrainian families were recorded to be living in temporary accommodation allocated by their local authorities. Sunflower Sisters said that of the 14,000 families they have assisted since the war began they had seen “around five to ten every week having to go back” to Ukraine.
Iryna Yemelianova and her two children gave up on Britain and returned to Kyiv in March, despite nightly Russian air raids. The 37-year-old says she depends on sedatives in an effort to sleep through them. Her son and daughter, who are both in primary school, have become aware of the war around them and are stuck “living in a mode of night awakenings”.
A few months earlier, she was safe in the quaint town of Wiveliscombe, Somerset, with sponsoring hosts that she had described as a “second family”.
Yet after a year, Yemelianova felt she had overstayed her welcome. “My hosts asked me what my plans were for the future. They said in January ‘we have time until March 31’ when they hoped to do renovations, but they said they could change their plans. But I know they wanted to do it in the summer. I decided not to stay.”
Yemelianova found herself effectively homeless, one year after fleeing Ukraine in February 2022.
She is one of dozens of refugees that are said to be leaving Britain for the war-torn country every week rather than face homelessness.
Yemelianova’s apartment in Kharkiv was destroyed by Russian shelling last year. She would have remained in the UK but was unable to afford the rent and utility costs without a working partner, despite receiving unemployment and child benefits. “I would [have] definitely stayed if I could work all day [without children] and earn enough to rent a house and be able to buy food,” she said. “I am in love with the UK [but] it is impossible to rent. I once had dreams, plans and goals. My whole world has collapsed.”
Sunflower Sisters has accused the government of offering refugees “inadequate housing solutions” that have forced refugees “to return to Ukraine”. Good said one refugee who had worked with the charity to assist others had reluctantly returned to Odesa, which is routinely targeted by Russian missiles.
“The reality is that Ukrainians are often bottom of the list for agents seeking to find new tenants and few have saved sufficient money to offer several months of rent in advance to overcome the lack of guarantor. Despite the government announcing that councils could act as guarantors, very few went ahead and set up guarantor schemes.” Sunflower Sisters has also said it is aware of “hundreds and hundreds” of Ukrainian families still waiting to get a sponsor and UK visas because of backlogs, which it claims have left “pregnant women giving birth on the street as they wait to come to the UK”.
Even when the Russian bombs were falling within earshot, the decision to start a new life in London was a difficult one for Kseniya Fiialkova. It meant tearing her eight-year-old son, Makar, away from his father, who was trapped by a Ukrainian law keeping men of fighting age in the country. Her husband refused to let them go, and she knew if they left it would mean the end of their marriage.
She agonised for weeks. On the quiet days, moving seemed mad. But the loud days had her huddling in terror in the basement with Makar, searching for tickets for the next bus to Poland.
Then the missiles took out the electricity in their home outside Kyiv in May last year and she decided it was time to go. With help from friends in London, she found a sponsor in Beckenham, south London. They helped her fill out the forms, then she waited. And waited. It was a further eight weeks of bombardment before the pair were finally granted entry to Britain.
So many of the nearly 200,000 Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Britain since President Putin sent his tanks across the border have similar stories. They are overwhelmingly appreciative of the kindness of individual Britons, but frustrated by the slow pace and opacity of officialdom.
The Home Office maintains it is “processing visas as quickly as they come in, enabling thousands more Ukrainians to come through our uncapped routes”. It added that while it aimed to assess all visa applications under the Ukraine schemes as quickly as possible, visas may take longer in some cases because of checks.
A spokesman for the Department for Levelling Up said: “In response to Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, we launched one of the fastest and biggest visa schemes in UK history. More than 170,000 Ukrainians have now arrived safely in the UK as a result.
“All arrivals can work, study and access benefits from day one, and we have increased ‘thank you’ payments for sponsors up from £350 to £500 a month once a guest has been here for a year.
“We have provided an additional £150 million to councils to support Ukrainian guests into their own homes — this can be used to help them remain in their current accommodation or find alternative housing.”
However, the Local Government Association, which represents local councils, said they “remain concerned that there is no funding beyond the first year for councils for their support for Ukrainian households and funding for arrivals in 2023 has halved.”
The funding can also be used by local authorities to address “wider homelessness pressures”, which Sunflower Sisters said risks the money “disappearing down a black hole”.
‘Rent in London is so high I have to return to a war zone.’ Is the impression it gives, where as the article is ‘government dont even bother translating documents and create avoidable situation’
4 comments
**by Shayma Bakht, Maxim Tucker**
Shivering on the floor under a bunk bed in a men’s hostel, Yulia remembered the Russian bombs falling on Kyiv and tried to convince herself that coming to London was a good idea.
She had arrived four months earlier when a friend of a friend, a man in his thirties, had offered to become her sponsor under the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. But their relationship had broken down.
“He would dump wet clothes from the washing machine on my bed, eat my food and turn off the hot water if I spent too long in the bathroom,” she told The Times, requesting not to use her last name. “I asked the council what I should do. They told me they would relocate me to social housing.”
Yet after she announced that she was moving out, the council did nothing. Desperate to leave, but unable to speak English, she went to work illegally as a pot washer in an Indian restaurant. Other staff felt sorry for her, and sometimes put her up for the night, or sneaked her into their hostel rooms.
Yulia’s correspondence with the council, seen by The Times, highlights how British bureaucracy has failed to respond with urgency to help Ukrainian refugees who fall out with a sponsor and find themselves on the brink of homelessness. In the correspondence, Yulia is addressed as Yassin, her requests for interpretation are ignored, and she is told that to receive assistance she would have to provide documents only a permanent resident would have.
Sunflower Sisters, an organisation that offers Ukrainian women emergency assistance, said councils were not providing an adequate safety net for refugees falling out of sponsorship arrangements. “In most areas, the onus has been placed on the individuals to find their own [new] sponsor or rental property. As they face ‘brick walls’ in the rental market, they are faced with the difficult decision to return,” said Dr Alice Good, the founder of the charity, who has been honoured by the King for her services to Ukrainian refugees.
Even when local authorities do step in to help, that help can be problematic. Families the charity works with have been placed in hotels “for months on end”, with some even reportedly “forced to boil eggs in kettles to ensure their children could eat a hot meal”.
More than 6,000 Ukrainian households in England were owed homelessness relief duty from their local authority in June and 4,200 of these had dependent children, according to the Department for Levelling Up. A spokesman said they would be “raising concerns with the government on the growing number of Ukrainians presenting as homeless to councils”.
As of last month, around 500 Ukrainian families were recorded to be living in temporary accommodation allocated by their local authorities. Sunflower Sisters said that of the 14,000 families they have assisted since the war began they had seen “around five to ten every week having to go back” to Ukraine.
Iryna Yemelianova and her two children gave up on Britain and returned to Kyiv in March, despite nightly Russian air raids. The 37-year-old says she depends on sedatives in an effort to sleep through them. Her son and daughter, who are both in primary school, have become aware of the war around them and are stuck “living in a mode of night awakenings”.
A few months earlier, she was safe in the quaint town of Wiveliscombe, Somerset, with sponsoring hosts that she had described as a “second family”.
Yet after a year, Yemelianova felt she had overstayed her welcome. “My hosts asked me what my plans were for the future. They said in January ‘we have time until March 31’ when they hoped to do renovations, but they said they could change their plans. But I know they wanted to do it in the summer. I decided not to stay.”
Yemelianova found herself effectively homeless, one year after fleeing Ukraine in February 2022.
She is one of dozens of refugees that are said to be leaving Britain for the war-torn country every week rather than face homelessness.
Yemelianova’s apartment in Kharkiv was destroyed by Russian shelling last year. She would have remained in the UK but was unable to afford the rent and utility costs without a working partner, despite receiving unemployment and child benefits. “I would [have] definitely stayed if I could work all day [without children] and earn enough to rent a house and be able to buy food,” she said. “I am in love with the UK [but] it is impossible to rent. I once had dreams, plans and goals. My whole world has collapsed.”
Sunflower Sisters has accused the government of offering refugees “inadequate housing solutions” that have forced refugees “to return to Ukraine”. Good said one refugee who had worked with the charity to assist others had reluctantly returned to Odesa, which is routinely targeted by Russian missiles.
“The reality is that Ukrainians are often bottom of the list for agents seeking to find new tenants and few have saved sufficient money to offer several months of rent in advance to overcome the lack of guarantor. Despite the government announcing that councils could act as guarantors, very few went ahead and set up guarantor schemes.” Sunflower Sisters has also said it is aware of “hundreds and hundreds” of Ukrainian families still waiting to get a sponsor and UK visas because of backlogs, which it claims have left “pregnant women giving birth on the street as they wait to come to the UK”.
Even when the Russian bombs were falling within earshot, the decision to start a new life in London was a difficult one for Kseniya Fiialkova. It meant tearing her eight-year-old son, Makar, away from his father, who was trapped by a Ukrainian law keeping men of fighting age in the country. Her husband refused to let them go, and she knew if they left it would mean the end of their marriage.
She agonised for weeks. On the quiet days, moving seemed mad. But the loud days had her huddling in terror in the basement with Makar, searching for tickets for the next bus to Poland.
Then the missiles took out the electricity in their home outside Kyiv in May last year and she decided it was time to go. With help from friends in London, she found a sponsor in Beckenham, south London. They helped her fill out the forms, then she waited. And waited. It was a further eight weeks of bombardment before the pair were finally granted entry to Britain.
So many of the nearly 200,000 Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Britain since President Putin sent his tanks across the border have similar stories. They are overwhelmingly appreciative of the kindness of individual Britons, but frustrated by the slow pace and opacity of officialdom.
The Home Office maintains it is “processing visas as quickly as they come in, enabling thousands more Ukrainians to come through our uncapped routes”. It added that while it aimed to assess all visa applications under the Ukraine schemes as quickly as possible, visas may take longer in some cases because of checks.
A spokesman for the Department for Levelling Up said: “In response to Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, we launched one of the fastest and biggest visa schemes in UK history. More than 170,000 Ukrainians have now arrived safely in the UK as a result.
“All arrivals can work, study and access benefits from day one, and we have increased ‘thank you’ payments for sponsors up from £350 to £500 a month once a guest has been here for a year.
“We have provided an additional £150 million to councils to support Ukrainian guests into their own homes — this can be used to help them remain in their current accommodation or find alternative housing.”
However, the Local Government Association, which represents local councils, said they “remain concerned that there is no funding beyond the first year for councils for their support for Ukrainian households and funding for arrivals in 2023 has halved.”
The funding can also be used by local authorities to address “wider homelessness pressures”, which Sunflower Sisters said risks the money “disappearing down a black hole”.
[deleted]
[I know how you feel mate.](https://media.tenor.com/sepMam3FCBwAAAAM/die-hard-john-mc-clane.gif)
This article title is silly.
‘Rent in London is so high I have to return to a war zone.’ Is the impression it gives, where as the article is ‘government dont even bother translating documents and create avoidable situation’