ESRC COLIF with West Yorkshire ICB and West Yorkshire Housing Partnership

The fellowship will provide an opportunity to deliver impact from the collaboration between the fellow, the ICB and WYHP. Research and findings from this work will be put into practice to help identify measures to begin addressing the high levels of homelessness faced by new refugees and asylum seekers, and in turn, support the associated priorities of the fellow’s partners (see above).
The fellowship will also involve collaborating with a wider range of organisations, including local authorities and housing, homelessness and migration charities, like Migration Yorkshire and the No Accommodation Network (NACCOM), to organise and facilitate a workshop. The HHI [and University of Leeds] has strong relations with many of these groups which will help enhance participation and facilitate discussion. The workshop will aim to include people with direct experience of the asylum process to ensure that their expertise informs any proposed solutions. The workshop has two aims.
to use recent research from the Fellow, Huddersfield and Leeds academic partners(Brown et al. 2023; Smith and Lockwood 2021; Smith and Waite 2019), and charities like NACCOM (NACCOM 2023), that highlight gaps in housing support and differential rights embedded into asylum policy, alongside workshop participants’ experiences, to agree priority areas that are critical to tackling homelessness among new refugees and people seeking asylum.
to develop specific proposals on changes needed at local/regional and at national level, to prevent homelessness among refugees and asylum seekers.
The Fellow, with support from Prof Phil Brown at the HHI and Dr Kate Smith, University of Leeds, will further develop these recommendations into a policy briefing for national-level government, and regional practice informed by workshop outcomes.
The briefing will be shared and discussed with local, regional and national decision-makers, and housing and homelessness bodies such as the Northern Housing Consortium, Centre for Homelessness Impact and Homelessness Link. These will also be disseminated to government bodies such as the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and relevant All-Party Parliamentary Groups.
The research and outputs will also be shared with HEIs participating within the ERSC’s Impact Acceleration Accounts - University of York, Liverpool, Manchester, Huddersfield and Sheffield.
The fellowship will further facilitate opportunities for workshop participants and partners to collaboratively apply for funding (e.g. Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust or the Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership) that supports further development/implementation of a key proposal identified through discussion, as a pilot project.