A new report from the University of Oxford's Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity (GEM) has revealed that critical spending of £20 billion on migrant welcoming schemes in the 10 years from 2013-24 was poorly coordinated and driven by a reactive "crisis" mentality.
The ‘Future of Welcoming in the UK’ study, undertaken by the GEM team based at the University of Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), estimated the overall costs of supporting newcomer communities over the last ten years (2013/14- 2023/24) at over £20 billion (or £38 billion when accounting for inflation,) across 26 separate funding streams.
This includes significant overspend funding for asylum accommodation provision (over £10 billion) as well as targeted support for people arriving from Afghanistan, Syria, Hong Kong and Ukraine.
The analysis notes that funding waxes and wanes over time, in line with the opening and closing of new bespoke schemes, but that funding is broadly focused on the ‘front end’ of welcoming – the initial weeks or months after arrival – with little focus on longer term integration outcomes, including wider goals of community cohesion and broader community consent for migration. Where these longer-term programmes do exist, they are much smaller in scale and often require local authorities to ‘bid-in’ – a process which has been criticized as requiring significant investment of time for relatively small amounts of money.
Migration brings both costs and economic benefits to the UK. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that a net increase of migration by 350,000 would reduce net borrowing by £7.4 billion by 2028/2029 (after taking into account the costs to public services identified here).1 The Future of Welcoming in the UK report does not attempt to replicate or challenge official data, but rather to collate spending to support more efficient and rational resource allocation.
The report proposes a new model for welcoming in the UK, reshaping the existing funding from crisis-led, reactive provision to proactive interventions which:
- aim to build up social infrastructure and capacity as well as meeting immediate need;
- can support wider government priorities, in particular in relation to devolution, but also in relation to wider social integration and cohesion and inclusive economic growth;
- understands that welcoming supports ongoing local consent for migration, which is vital for migration governance, building community support and mitigating tensions;
- understands welcoming as a devolved responsibility working closely with local, regional and devolved administrations to create long term welcoming plans.
Jacqueline Broadhead, Director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, said: "Sensible investment in welcoming has a genuine and positive impact for new arrivals, in particular the thousands who have arrived from Syria, Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Ukraine through bespoke schemes established by the government and delivered by local government and community hosting. However, this funding has been fragmented across 26 different funding schemes, without an overall aim and lacking alignment with wider government priorities.
“For example, the sums that the UK has spent on asylum accommodation over the last decade are unnecessarily high, and this serves nobody well. Better planning and organisation could have reduced this sum substantially, and helped the country to invest in a longer-term and more acceptable model.”
Since the period of analysis, the government has taken several steps which address some of the issues highlighted in the report, including work to combine funding schemes from bespoke schemes to make them more flexible for local authorities, devolution of the adult skills budget to combined authorities, the linking of skills planning and migration, and pilots to trial new approaches to asylum accommodation. This analysis sets out a broader model for ensuring that invested funding can achieve the best possible outcomes.
Broadhead added: “There is a real opportunity to reshape this investment so that welcoming funding helps to improve the locations in which new communities are hosted; so that it widens and deepens devolution settlements – giving more power to local communities; and so that it provides value for money for taxpayers and supports wider community cohesion and consent for migration.”
Notes for Editors
For more information or to arrange an interview, please contact Delphine Boagey, Communications Officer at COMPAS delphine.boagey@compas.ox.ac.uk
The full breakdown of costs across the 29 funding streams can be found in the final report here.
About COMPAS
The Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) is a research centre at the University of Oxford. Since 2003, COMPAS has established an international reputation for original research and policy relevance. It undertakes multi-disciplinary research, publication, teaching, and user engagement activities with a broad set of academic and non-academic users worldwide.
COMPAS has over 20 staff members from a range of backgrounds and is actively involved in many international networks and projects. COMPAS is based within the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography and houses long-standing initiatives The Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, and The Migration Observatory. https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/