Only two Syrian refugee families have been resettled under the government’s community refugee sponsorship scheme, six months after it was unveiled by the home secretary and the archbishop of Canterbury.

One of the charities supporting the development, which is designed to help individuals and community groups offer housing and other support to refugees, said the delay “risked squandering the resources of hundreds of volunteers happy to help save the government time and money”.



The Open Society Foundations, backed by financier George Soros, said they had “dozens of community groups ready and willing to take the burden for resettling refugees off the government’s shoulders but their applications have been stuck in a queue for six months”.

The organisation noted that Canada had resettled more than 13,000 Syrian refugees through a similar private sponsorship programme since November 2015. “The response to this scheme has been overwhelmingly positive; now is the right moment to capture this enthusiasm and momentum,” it said.



The community refugee sponsorship scheme was meant to supplement the work of the Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement scheme, under which the government pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020. So far 4,400 have been accepted under this programme.

Launching the community scheme last July, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said: “I hope that this new approach will help bring communities together and support these often traumatised and vulnerable families as they rebuild their lives.”

The government launched a website at the same time for people who wanted to register offers of support – everything from offers of work, mentoring and baby equipment to housing. Sponsors were due to provide housing for the refugee families and to offer them help with integration into life in the UK.

The archbishop of Canterbury welcomed a family to live in a cottage in the grounds of Lambeth Palace. Only one other family has been welcomed under the scheme since then.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Our intention has always been that this relatively new scheme would start on a small scale and be monitored closely to ensure it delivers positive outcomes for resettled families and local communities.

“We have seen considerable interest in the scheme from across the UK and are working with a number of groups as they develop their plans. Supporting a vulnerable resettled family is a significant responsibility and it is only right that we carefully assess every sponsoring organisation.”

The director of the UK Syrian resettlement programme, Paul Morrison, said in a Commons committee hearing last year that the government was “deliberately starting relatively small-scale, because this is a new and novel approach in this country”. Officials were creating a system for checking whether potential sponsors had a “credible plan” for supporting a resettled family, backed by “relevant experience”, and would not pose any risk to the resettled family.

The public accounts committee report noted that “community sponsorship is new to the UK”, unlike Canada, which has been running a similar initiative for the past 40 years and has made wide use of private sponsorship and community sponsorship as part of its resettlement programmes.



David Simmonds, chair of the Local Government Association’s asylum, refugee and migration taskforce, said it was a cause for concern if “volunteers, who could take some burden off the taxpayer, are not having their offers of help taken up. Why have taxpayers’ money used if there are people ready to volunteer?”

Gregory Maniatis, senior migration policy advisor with the Open Society Foundations, was meeting Home Office officials to discuss the policy on Wednesday. He said he believed the UK government was doing pioneering work in this area. “It is very difficult to launch a programme like this,” he said. “It takes a lot of infrastructure and you don’t want to get it wrong. It is hard to build a grassroots movement to support refugees, but it can potentially be a game-changer. Public attitudes can shift in positive ways.”