Tania, mum of a 13-year-old boy trying to navigate a new life, is just one of the thousands of Ukrainian refugees made homeless after coming to the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.
The scheme, the first of its kind, was launched in March 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and so far 117,700 Ukrainians have arrived under it. However, problems with the scheme arose almost immediately when some hosts quickly realised the effort it took to take on a refugee family. Within the first year at least 4,295 Ukrainian households – a six-fold increase since June 2022 – have turned to local councils for help with homelessness, according to analysis by Sky News.
“They were becoming sick of us,” Tania said. She was reflecting on her short time with her first host family in Prestwich, Greater Manchester. “They were telling me we didn’t talk or behave in the right way and one day they told us we had to leave.”
Despite committing to a six-month placement, Tania and her son’s hosts contacted the council three months in to end the arrangement. They were registered as homeless, and the council arranged temporary hotel accommodation.
The mother and son fled from their small town near Kropyvnytskyi in May 2022. Tania, reluctant to leave her close family members, realised how much danger her son was in when a missile flew over their town towards a nearby military base. She signed up for the Homes for Ukraine scheme as soon as it was advertised.
Tania was overwhelmed with the responses to her Facebook post, but she had to choose a host quickly. She wanted to live in a city so she could get a job more easily and have access to good public transport, so Manchester was the perfect place. Her initial host family was a married couple and the wife spoke Russian so she would be able to communicate. But the perfect scenario rapidly broke down and by August Tania and her son were living out of suitcases in various hotels.
Tania said she was extremely grateful to her hosts even though she and her teenage son had to share a small room – so suddenly having to move back and forth between different budget hotels was a shock. “You don’t really know how long you’ll stay in one place so you can’t really unpack. Sometimes you’ll be told you are about to leave the hotel and then they’ll change their mind.”
The living situation was quickly becoming unbearable. “We Ukrainians are also humans,” she said. “It’s like one stress leads to another because we’ve just fled a warzone and our country and now, we are in a new country and a lot of us don’t have the language skills to make ourselves understood.”
Thankfully, Tania and her son managed to secure a new placement two months later, something the local council said would be almost impossible, with a family they had met during their time with their first hosts. But she is already concerned about move-on accommodation and living independently once this new placement ends.
This situation is just one of many faced by Ukrainians under the Homes for Ukraine scheme. It was clear from the launch that funding and support were going to be the most important aspects making this scheme work. But now the funding for local councils has been almost halved, fewer and fewer hosts are willing to take part again.
Jez Myers, from Manchester, and his girlfriend, Ukrainian journalist Maria Romanenko, have seen first-hand how the issues with the Homes for Ukraine scheme have impacted desperate refugees and how they should have been prevented.
Cultural differences
“You have to understand Ukrainian culture to make this work,” said Jez, who has lived in both Ukraine and the UK. “Ukraine is a massive country and people don’t realise how huge it is. You have extreme wealth in Kyiv and in other areas you can have ridiculous levels of poverty. In the west you have a huge push towards westernised culture, capitalism, Europeanism, and in the south-east you absolutely don’t.”
Jez believes UK hosts wrongly expected the Ukrainian families to be culturally similar and this is one of the main issues with the scheme. “It leads to immediate issues if they’re not super European, and differences between those who have never lived through communism and Soviet times and those who have are not necessarily being communicated to hosts. There’s a huge difference. There’s such a wide range in views.” In Tania’s case, cultural differences are what put an early end to her placement.
One difference, Jez and Maria explained, is as minor as children’s’ bedtimes. In the UK, children tend to have set bedtimes enforced by their parents but in Ukraine the children simply put themselves to bed when they feel tired. Another, especially in the generation who lived in Soviet Ukraine, is an “anti-capitalist” mindset and a tendency to save money and hoard. Maria’s mother, for example, only buys yellow-sticker produce while in the UK. When the couple took her to their local Wetherspoons and introduced her to the unlimited self-service coffee machine she worked her way through all the milky coffee options and, when asked if she would like to go again someday, responded: “£1.25 for a coffee? I’m not posh, you know.”
Cultural differences are likely to cause disagreements in hosting placements but it’s just one of the issues impacting Ukrainians under the scheme.
Move-on accommodation
Move-on accommodation, the private rental accommodation Ukrainians are encouraged to find after a placement ends, has come with a multitude of issues.
The lack of available and affordable housing is one of the leading reasons for a rise in Ukrainian families facing homelessness. Ukrainians, with no history of work in the UK and often no guarantor, are competing against Britons with a credit history and more experience of the UK renting system. The shortage of lower-cost housing has had a huge impact on the entire nation which means Ukrainians often find themselves in ‘bidding wars’ they cannot win.
Jez said the huge lack of social housing in the UK was always going to be an issue: “Ukrainians are having all the problems you and I would face if we found ourselves having to rent somewhere quickly – but these problems are escalated and exaggerated because of the many drawbacks they face by being new to the country.”
Hosts may also be getting frustrated that some Ukrainians are reluctant to sign contracts to live independently and set up their own lives. Instead, some want to stay in temporary placements in case the war ends, and they can return home. Maria understands this as both a Ukrainian and a journalist reporting on the conflict. “I still don’t know if I made the right decision leaving Ukraine,” she said. “I was very close to my grandma. She was my last surviving grandparent and she got very poorly in the last couple of years. She passed away on Christmas day last year and one of my biggest regrets was not being able to say goodbye to her. I haven’t seen most of my family for a year.”
Jez said it is difficult for some Ukrainians to accept a new life here when their qualifications are not accepted, and a doctor or lawyer can only get jobs as cleaning staff. Ukrainians ‘are always doing things with one foot out the door’, and there is a huge amount of survivors’ guilt for those who left which is impacting their long-term decisions.
Wrap-around support
Hosts taking part in the Homes for Ukraine scheme were promised ‘wrap-around support’ from local councils. However, there’s been a huge disparity in the amount of support given per council. For example, only some councils are using the funding – originally £10,500 per adult Ukrainian but recently cut to just £5,900 – to help facilitate access to private rented accommodation. This means some hosts are expected to provide more support than others in more helpful council areas.
“The biggest issue of all is the Homes for Ukraine scheme is not how it was initially advertised,” Jez explained. “What you’re finding now is some hosts are turning around and saying it’s been too much effort and it hasn’t worked out.”
Some hosts have been expected to arrange bank accounts and set up GPs for their Ukrainian guests, which is something they didn’t expect to be doing themselves. Because of language barriers, many Ukrainians are also unable to find jobs and are therefore in the house a lot more than hosts initially expected – which is causing disagreements.
There is also a huge need for psychological and legal support, Maria says. “The hosts are signing up for six months and I know it’s not legally binding but some of the Ukrainians find themselves kicked out after a few months with no legal support. There’s no support for them if things go wrong – or there is, but they have to search for it in a country they have no experience of.”
Lack of hosts
A lack of the promised ‘wrap-around support’ has led to a shortage of available hosts.
When Tania contacted her local council to register as homeless, she was told there were no more hosts, and it would be incredibly difficult to find a new placement. Only 72% of Ukrainian households were surveyed by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities so the number of Ukrainian households needing social housing because of homelessness is expected to be even higher than 4,295.
But should these issues have been prepared for?
Yes, says Maria.
“It could have been done in a faster, more organised way,” she said. “Because the world was warning Ukraine of the possible full-scale invasion for weeks and weeks. The first warnings came in December so what did they spend those few months on?”
Tania and her son are just one of the Ukrainian households heavily impacted by the major issues of the Homes for Ukraine scheme – and they were two of the luckier ones who weren’t forced to move across the country after their initial placement ended. With funding cuts and a lack of hosts, things can only be expected to worsen. And the war goes on.
“The Homes for Ukraine scheme has undoubtedly been a great scheme,” Jez said. “But we should never have taken our eye off the ball and pretended like there haven’t been flaws.
“As Maria pointed out, these flaws were foreseeable. Don’t promise wrap-around support if you’re not going to provide wrap-around support.
“Be honest.”
