Capacity for Welcoming

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Overview

Migrant integration and inclusion are crucial to overall consent for migration and to strengthening belonging; yet in the UK, questions of integration and welcoming are often relatively low in salience compared to migration governance.

However, shifts in UK policymaking, particularly concerning the UK’s devolution agenda and upcoming cohesion and communities strategy, signal a window of opportunity for change. Alongside this, there is growing innovation in cities and towns, driven by expertise developed through crisis mobilisations supporting arrivals from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, and others, and by an increasing role for other actors, particularly combined and strategic authorities, as a consequence of the devolution white paper.

Integrated settlements (newly active in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, and due to expand to West Yorkshire, the North East, Liverpool, and South Yorkshire in 2026) will draw together diverse policy areas in a ‘Total Place’ model. This could allow for significant additional capacity for innovation – for example, by drawing together work focused on climate resilience and integration, and by developing work on local industrial strategy and skills planning. These areas often share aligned aims, but there is little existing policy crossover. This work will draw on local action to develop climate resilience through community development and explore how this interacts with local efforts to support newcomer communities, some of which have direct experience of climate displacement.

This project aims to draw on innovation in local and regional government and to identify and shape spaces for central government action to strengthen community resilience and inclusion in UK towns and cities.

Principal Investigator

Jacqueline Broadhead, Director, Global Exchange on Migration & Diversity

Researchers

Melissa Weihmayer, Researcher, Global Exchange on Migration & Diversity

Funding

Unbound Philanthropy

The project will draw on the Inclusive Cities framework, which outlines five ways of working for local areas on inclusion and integration, as well as five thematic areas. These are:

5 ways of working:

1. Provide local leadership to create change
2. Make inclusion a shared responsibility, delivered in partnership
3. Work with both newcomers and longer-standing residents
4. Use available data and evidence to understand the local context to identify core priorities, set goals, obtain resources, monitor impact and update strategies as needed
5. Take action at the local level, provide advocacy at the national level and learn from best practices internationally

5 thematic areas:

1. Developing a shared narrative of inclusion
2. Supporting and driving inclusive economic growth
3. Connecting communities
4. Mainstreaming and building inclusive public services throughout the city (including services such as housing and wider cross-cutting priorities such as the intersection between welcoming policy and action on climate change).
5. Encouraging civic participation, empowerment and representation

This programme will involve:

• Targeted work in 4-5 local authorities and regional authorities – which will be shaped with the LAs themselves, but may include – development of integration and/or newcomer strategy, sustained learning from existing interventions (not evaluation, but instead learning partner work), convening of local partners around a thematic focus (for example, the intersection of climate and welcoming)
• Sustained engagement with central government and devolved administrations – in particular MHCLG and the Home Office, targeted particularly at the governance and delivery of integration and cohesion policy (which sits between the two departments) to ensure that learning from work with local authorities feeds into work happening at the national level. This will be alongside engagement with the devolved administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, each of which has distinctive approaches to integration and welcoming.
• Shared convening of local authority and combined authority stakeholders – Local government has very few opportunities for shared learning in this space. This programme will support the convening of partners around shared action topics (as identified in targeted LA work). This will build on convenings hosted in Brighton and Coventry as part of the Welcoming Futures initiative.
• Convening with key strategic partnerships already active in this space

Aims

Ultimate goal

To achieve a step change in welcoming and inclusion practices at the local level in the UK

Intermediate outcomes

• Targeted regional and local authorities have developed clear, actionable plans for local inclusion and welcome, leading to policy changes and implementation.
• Local governments (in the selected areas) have greater policy capacity on inclusion and welcoming at the local level.
• The welcoming sector (including relevant NGO and local government voices) is moving towards building a shared voice on welcoming, in particular in its asks to central government, with a specific focus on devolution and cohesion strategy, so that community cohesion and welcoming are included as an integral part of the devolution settlement

What devolution and local election results could mean for integration in England by Melissa Weihmayer
Blog | LSE | 20 May 2026

Proactive local government: How London borough councils build capacity to respond to asylum by Melissa Weihmayer
Article | 18 February 2026