Proactive local government: How London borough councils build capacity to respond to asylum

Abstract

London’s borough councils are adapting to the increase in asylum-seekers since 2020. I explore their shift from reactive to more strategic and proactive responses, observed during a series of ‘design lab’ workshops between January and June 2023 in the Greater London Authority’s Asylum Welcome programme. Driven by a need to be better prepared to support people seeking asylum, I examine how councils built capacity despite limited funding and no clear role within asylum policy. I find that capacity-building is a multi-stage process that extends beyond new skills and resources. It requires resolving dilemmas to clarify roles and goals, and building confidence through knowledge and partnerships, before developing skills for implementation. Ultimately, I show that such capacity-building processes reveal how local government does political work through its practice: they affirm the local state’s duty of care to people seeking asylum. Though they struggle to change asylum policy without central government reforms, this research nonetheless recasts local governments as well-equipped to adapt to new and uncertain challenges.

Sense of futility

After the final session of a series of workshops with local government officers from different boroughs in London, Nima, a participant with lived experience of asylum, talked about the issues facing the asylum-seekers that rely on him for support. ¹ “What people seeking asylum really need,” he explained, “are three basic things. The knowledge, the confidence to access the knowledge, and the tools to use the knowledge.” By ‘knowledge’ he meant information about specific services and support available, but also a greater contextual understanding of the asylum process, local policies, and ways to adapt to life and culture in the United Kingdom.

Nima’s perspective emphasises agency, asserting that people seeking asylum can learn to navigate some aspects of their situations if administrative processes are made more transparent. But I was struck by his mention of ‘confidence’. This supposes that providing information is insufficient; more is needed to empower people to use that information, particularly when stuck in a system that explicitly disempowers. Indeed, with its restrictions and minimal support, the current UK asylum system enforces poverty for uncertain lengths of time, leaving those within it struggling to survive (Darling, 2022a; Mayblin et al., 2020), often depending on voluntary sector organisations for help if and where they are available (Mayblin and James, 2019).

How can and should local government step in to meet these immense needs? Though life circumstances clearly differ, the local government officers I spoke with also demonstrated a lack of confidence. A sense of futility prevailed in 2023, especially in early workshops of a programme called Asylum Welcome as the officers struggled to navigate rapidly changing asylum policy. Creating positive impact for both people seeking asylum and the communities in which they live often felt out of reach. Yet the workshops demonstrated that progress was possible.

This research investigates capacity-building processes of local governments that operate within restrictive migration policy contexts. Asylum in the UK is one such context that offers a ‘least likely case’ of local government intervention (Oliver et al., 2020) because local governments have no clear role within asylum governance and little funding to provide services. Examining London borough councils’ activities proves especially interesting because of a nearly twofold increase in asylum-seekers housed in the capital since 2020, driven by the introduction of hotels as asylum accommodation. London therefore represents an ideal case study for examining the effects of this policy change. Moreover, council responses to asylum differ across London because its thirty-two borough councils implement migrant integration work independently, revealing intra-city variation. This variation enables an exploration of why some councils develop a comprehensive response while others do not.

Based on observation of the Asylum Welcome programme, especially its 6-month ‘design lab’ learning process with eleven London borough councils from January to June 2023, 6 months of insider research, and semi-structured interviews, I observed changes to the internal capacity of some councils to respond to this emerging and pressing issue while others struggled to adapt.

I draw on public administration and urban planning literature to explore how capacity was developed. I propose that a council moves from ‘reactive’ towards ‘proactive’ responses by building both capacity and confidence. ‘Confidence’ invokes the subjective and objective sense of power that underpins capacity. Councils develop this through gaining expertise and political leverage through partnerships. But they must also resolve key dilemmas before they can assert a role for local governments in this policy area. I thereby nuance the local government practice of discretionary decision-making, responding to Darling (2022b), by framing it as one possible outcome of larger capacity-building processes.

I argue that by aiming for proactivity in asylum responses, local governments are contesting central government through their practice. They do so by affirming people seeking asylum as local residents under local duties of care. This intervenes in the politics of asylum governance as local governments demonstrate their suitability for taking on more responsibility in this policy area. Yet local government action remains restricted in its ability to meaningfully improve the lives of asylum-seeking residents and transform asylum policy without central government reforms.

First, I explain the rationale for revisiting the local government’s role within asylum policy. After discussing London’s asylum context, the empirical section gives examples of proactivity and analyses the steps that councils take towards proactive responses, examining key dilemmas that officers grappled with during the design labs. Resolving these dilemmas, complemented by a mix of confidence-building and capacity-building, widened the space for discretionary decision-making and enabled shifts towards more proactive responses.

Decoupled landscape

The growth in research on sources of support to migrants in ‘superdiverse’ cities like London (Vertovec, 2007) tends to overlook the role of local government, instead folding it into an abstract category of the local state. The work on ‘arrival infrastructures’, for example, often assumes local governments play a small or non-existent role, focusing instead on the influence of voluntary sector organisations and existing migrant networks (see Wessendorf, 2022). These perspectives beneficially view the city from the vantage point of diverse and fluid migrant groups, as the ways they interact with the city are not confined to district boundaries. But they underemphasise interactions with state structures, and how policies aiming to regulate migration are resisted and/or transformed by local governments. Asylum is one such policy area in which the local government role is poorly understood.

Migration policy has increasingly become part of a ‘decoupled’ multilevel governance landscape (Scholten, 2013) across Europe, with persistent tensions between the central and the local level (Broadhead, 2020). The local level experiences the impacts of rapid changes to its communities but has few policy tools it can use to mitigate these. By contrast, the central level uses immigration policy as a tool for managing its geopolitical priorities, defining who can enter its borders, belongs, and can claim resources from the ‘nation-state’ (El-Enany, 2020). This creates what Stürner-Siovitz (2023) calls the ‘urban migration governance paradox’, which posits that cities are disproportionally affected both by migration movements and migration policies negotiated at other scales.

Governments in the Global North have issued increasingly restrictive asylum policies that aim to provide the least level of service at the lowest cost (Oliver et al., 2020). Despite this, and in part because of it, local actors “have a major role in the practical management of asylum seeker reception” (Ibid, p. 5). This includes the local government, whether assigned this responsibility or not. Indeed, cities in the UK have an expanding role in integrating resettled refugees, but their work towards integrating those in the asylum system, even once they obtain refugee status, has been mixed. Broadhead (2020) argues this leads to differential outcomes for those individuals, as well as a “disparity in governance arrangements over the two schemes and the lack of institutional and policy coherence between and within them” (p. 4).

Local governments in UK asylum governance

Asylum policy in the UK is highly centralised. Asylum support, in the form of small financial payments ² and accommodation, is managed by the Home Office and its private sector and charity contractors. Despite this, local governments have intervened in asylum for different reasons, including to comply with separate statutory regulations such as their ‘duty of care’ to vulnerable children and adults. The City of Sanctuary Local Authority Network – a prominent source of knowledge-exchange for the London borough councils studied – describes local authorities as “firmly determined to meet our obligations as per the Children’s Act, Care Act, Equalities Act, Housing Act 2004, amongst other relevant legislation” (Tapsfield, 2023).

Local governments’ role in asylum governance and integration has varied over time due to changes in the implementation of national-level policy as well as local governments’ capacity to engage. In the early 2000s, some local authorities were given funding to manage asylum accommodation. This had practical benefits, for example putting to use housing that could not be sold off (Darling, 2022b). But it also enabled more holistic support to people seeking asylum. Building on existing relationships as a landlord, they could connect asylum seekers to other services and work on issues like social cohesion in their communities. Outsourcing asylum accommodation to private sector providers fundamentally changed the local authority’s involvement in asylum issues. Darling (2022a) traces how local governments lost capacity to manage this policy area since 2012 as local authority housing consortiums were outbid. The Home Office instead contracted six private sector accommodation providers, collectively called COMPASS (Commercial and Operating Managers Procuring Asylum Support). As a result of this lost funding and reduced responsibility, local governments quickly lost staff with expertise in this area, with some going to the private sector accommodation providers but then leaving within a year (Ibid).

Decisions around whether an asylum-seeker’s requests or needs while in supported accommodation can and should be met are made according to contractual agreements negotiated on 5-to-10-year timeframes (Ibid). Importantly, local authorities are unable to influence the terms of these contracts. The contracts were renewed in September 2019, with a combined value of £4 billion over 10 years (UK Home Office, 2019). In London, the accommodation provider contracted until 2029 is called Clearsprings Ready Homes, a stakeholder mentioned frequently within our workshops.

This combination of outsourcing and ‘contractualism’ subsumes changes in asylum policy to a gradual process of neoliberalisation (Darling, 2016). This process centralises power and bypasses, even undermines, local governments. It not only changed the way that asylum accommodation is governed, but also the way that asylum is perceived and valued in society. Discursive strategies produced “a shared understanding of asylum as a political and economic concern, most notably maintained through the rhetorical positioning of asylum seekers as a ‘burden’ on both public and private stakeholders” (Ibid, p. 231). Changes to the implementation of asylum policy were therefore justified as cost-saving measures. These took responsibility for the care of people seeking asylum away from both the public sector and the public gaze (Darling, 2022a; Hynes, 2011), making it more difficult for local governments to learn of asylum-seekers in their jurisdictions, let alone provide oversight.

Countering these losses of autonomy is a practice of employing discretion. Darling (2022b) defines this as the capacity of local authorities to make decisions despite a restrictive policy landscape; it is a form of influence that is often hidden (p. 2). In employing discretion, they are pushing the boundaries of their authority but, he argues, in very pragmatic and small ways and “at the cost of wider critiques” (Ibid, p. 8). Darling still views discretion as operating within a neoliberal framework: it is a ‘governance tool’ that helps to manage the tensions of national policymaking and local level implementation (Ibid, p. 2). Accordingly, local authority powers of discretion in the asylum space are deliberately reduced over time.

It is through these practices that asylum-seekers experience ‘slow violence’ as they navigate poverty in their everyday alongside the effects of state control (Mayblin et al., 2020). Combined with incessant waiting, uncertainty, and an inability to have complaints heard and dealt with, this lack of control leads to a ‘politics of exhaustion’ that inhibits resistance and opposition (Darling, 2022a). The same applies to civil society actors (Mayblin and James, 2019). Lost local state capacity resulted in placing undue burden on the voluntary sector to fill gaps, making exhaustion “a common condition within dispersal, not only for those dispersed, but also for those seeking to support asylum seekers” (Darling, 2022a, p. 187; Toğral Koca, 2022). This extended beyond asylum to welfare provision in general, as literature on the effects of austerity since 2010 attests (Clayton et al., 2016; Dagdeviren et al., 2019). A loss of capacity created greater demand that led to further losses in capacity as organisations and those working in them burnt out. The detrimental impacts and high stakes on local actors and asylum-seekers alike suggest that the relationship between discretion, capacity, and the politics of asylum merits revisiting.

Discretion and capacity

Neoliberalisation outsourced state services like asylum accommodation to new actors while austerity programs dramatically reduced local government budgets from 2010 onwards (Featherstone et al., 2012; Lowndes and Gardner, 2016). These trends together suggest a delinking of asylum from the local state. Despite this, practices of discretion are possible; indeed, I contend that Darling underestimates their significance. Spencer refers to similar types of activities as ‘shadow politics’ to describe the ways in which local authorities are navigating central government restrictions (Spencer, 2018). She reads outsourcing of certain work to voluntary sector organisations not as a technology of neoliberalism but as a strategic move to circumvent austerity constraints. Additionally, local government officers have been shown to demonstrate ‘municipal activism’ in their promotion of specific policy frames to guide their work (Spencer and Delvino, 2019). Though based on research on ‘irregular migrants’ rather than people seeking asylum, these frames nonetheless counter the rhetoric of viewing migrants as a financial burden and a security concern. I will revisit two that resonate for responses to asylum: an ‘efficiency’ frame highlighting the financial costs of inaction and a ‘socioeconomic’ frame emphasising the economic and social harm of excluding migrants long-term. By invoking inclusive policy narratives around migration, Broadhead (2020) similarly concludes that UK local governments are increasingly demonstrating leadership both as a convenor and place-shaper. A local councillor’s comments at the Asylum Welcome programme’s culminating event reflected these roles well: “As London local government, we have to grasp this… our work here is an extension of what London is. We need a proper partnership approach to meet our statutory responsibilities together.” This suggests greater potential within the discretionary activities of local government in shaping asylum conditions and policy.

In addition to underestimating discretionary capacity, Darling (2022b) does not explain why some local governments are better equipped for exercising discretion than others. Indeed, lack of capacity potentially undermines local governments’ roles in asylum. Broadhead (2020) finds that local government leadership in integration work is limited for two reasons: its ability to influence and improve service delivery remains broadly insufficient, and it struggles to maintain active and equal partnerships with the voluntary sector. I argue that both shortcomings are influenced by a lack of capacity in some form.

What capacities are needed for not just exercising but expanding discretion and developing innovative solutions to the support for and integration of people seeking asylum? Colloquially, ‘capacity’ tends to be used as shorthand for funding to hire new people, or time available to spend on a given project. ‘Capacity-building’ as an activity is also often used synonymously with ‘training’. But by focusing on capacity-building simply as the acquisition of new information, and capacity as the product of increased funding, we fail to examine the structural power imbalances that create capacity gaps in the public sector. Capacity is not power-neutral. Arts and Tatenhove (2004) describe it as “the ability of actors to mobilize resources in order to achieve certain outcomes in social relations” (p. 343), making capacity-building an exercise of empowerment. In this work I present capacity-building as a process with the potential to reshape power relations within and between different levels of government.

Asylum in London

Asylum policy disperses asylum-seekers across the UK, historically to poorer areas and away from London (Hynes, 2011). This has changed since 2020 with increased arrivals but also long processing backlogs, leading to the introduction of hotels as asylum accommodation (Walsh and Sumption, 2023). By March 2023, the period in which this research was conducted, over a fifth of people seeking asylum supported by the government (23.2%) were accommodated in London, up from 14.2% in March 2020 (UK Home Office, 2023a). Two thirds of those (16,337 people) were being accommodated in hotels of different types and the remaining third in community-based (commonly referred to as ‘dispersal’) accommodation.

The increase in numbers as well as hotels present new challenges for local authorities across the UK, but especially in London. These impacts are not felt evenly across London as the procurement of hotels is guided by their availability rather than consideration of asylum-seeker preferences, the local area or local authority capacity. The boroughs of Hillingdon and Hounslow, for example, together host 20% of people seeking asylum supported by the government in London (UK Home Office, 2023a) due to the prevalence of hotels close to Heathrow Airport. This creates high variance between boroughs. Boroughs thus have different ‘asylum profiles’, comprising of the number of people seeking asylum, type of accommodation, and demographics of the asylum-seeking population. Because each borough’s situation differs, there is no clear blueprint for asylum response.

The asylum system is at a turning point in the UK overall. The asylum dispersal policy is transitioning from opt-in to a system of ‘full dispersal’ with every local authority in the UK taking part based on quotas decided by region (Barnsley, 2023). At the same time, repeated advocacy attempts to change funding levels for services to people seeking asylum. Consequently, the Home Office provided an ‘Asylum Dispersal Grant’ to councils starting in 2022: one-time payments of £250 for each asylum-seeking resident present at a specific date (UK Home Office, 2022a), as well as £3500 for each new bedspace added for dispersal accommodation to encourage the transition to full dispersal (UK Home Office, 2022b). Surprisingly disconnected from these policy changes is the proposed dismantling of the asylum system under the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act and the 2023 Illegal Migration Act. These together deny people seeking international protection access to the UK’s asylum system, especially if they arrive via ‘small boats’ across the English Channel, subjecting them instead to detention and/or removal. Singer explains these acts as a ‘criminalesque approach to asylum’ because people arriving irregularly are rendered inadmissible and their very entry treated similarly to that of suspected criminal migrants (Singer, 2024). The Act faced substantial legal challenges however and, with the change in government administration from Conservative to Labour in 2024, has largely not been implemented (Walsh and Jorgensen, 2025). The Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill introduced in January 2025 does not make major changes to the asylum system. However, the most recent Asylum Dispersal Grant increases the amount per asylum-seeker to £1200, expands the use of the funds beyond statutory services, and mentions future piloting of a local-authority-led asylum accommodation system (UK Home Office, 2025). Broader discussions on the devolution of power in England (English Devolution White Paper, 2024) also open spaces for reform, making questions around local authority responsibilities towards asylum-seekers especially timely.

Methodology

I used a multi-stage, qualitative and pan-London research design to explore how London borough councils develop capacity to respond to asylum. A challenge in working with local government is navigating and maintaining access to spaces that are otherwise closed to the public (Van Hulst, 2008). To overcome this, I developed networks through a mix of work experience and outreach as a doctoral student. I was an ‘insider-researcher’ (Brannick and Coghlan, 2007) from October 2021 until March 2022 while employed part-time at the Greater London Authority (GLA). I became an observer (DeWalt and DeWalt, 2011) and at times a facilitator of knowledge exchange (Broadhead, 2020) during the implementation of the GLA-funded Asylum Welcome programme from January to June 2023. I observed its five ‘design lab’ workshops, which sought to enable experimentation and learning to improve outcomes for people seeking asylum in the city. ³

The eleven borough councils participating in the program applied to do so, implying they wanted to either develop or improve their responses to asylum. ⁴ Politically, two were Conservative councils, one was Independent, and the remaining were Labour-controlled. A mix of central and outer-London boroughs as well as boroughs with hotel and/or dispersal accommodation was intentional within the criteria for accepting council applications to enable discussions across different asylum profiles and geographic contexts. Additionally, I conducted ten semi-structured interviews with council officers and other migration stakeholders to understand how they experienced changes in asylum policy since 2020. I considered the 10 volunteers with lived experience of the asylum system who participated in the design lab workshops – like Nima – as collaborators to this research for their valuable reflections and challenging questions to council officers.

Using thematic analysis to inductively analyse my empirical material, I first developed categories addressing the general question: how are councils responding to asylum? These produced a list of the types of responses proposed and enacted, which I separated into reactive and proactive approaches (Weihmayer, 2024). I then explored the factors, conditions and activities that enabled council officers to perceive they were responding more proactively. This revealed capacity-building to be a multi-layered, nonlinear process. Finally, I explored policy dilemmas they confronted throughout the design labs. This “problem-oriented, ‘bottom-up’ approach with a specific focus on policy dilemmas” seeks to avoid the further politicisation of migration policymaking (Bauböck et al., 2022). A cornerstone of a decentred analysis of governance, dilemmas illuminate how governance evolves as a product of changing beliefs, traditions, and practices (Rhodes, 2007).

Capacity-building as a process

Definitions of ‘capacity’ evolved beyond funds or training by delineating the types of capacity needed for public sector institutions to function. Drawing on public administration literature, Wu et al. (2015) define ‘policy capacity’ as the set of skills and resources necessary to perform policy functions (p. 2). They envision policy capacity as the combination of analytical, operational, and political skills and competences operating at individual, organisational, and systemic levels. Though they argue this is comprehensive and avoids certain traps such as definitions of capacity “focus [ing] on what can be done with it” rather than what it constitutes (Ibid, p. 2), it nonetheless assumes that the expected policy functions are clear. By contrast, for asylum responses at local levels, the policy functions are both unclear and in dispute. I contend that supporting the integration of people seeking asylum is an illustrative case of capacity-building processes because it emerges, perhaps unexpectedly, as an “urban governance concern” (Mendes, 2008, p. 943) over time from strong civil society advocacy and changed material circumstances in cities.

For asylum in the UK, lacking a mandated role for city and local governments underpinned other challenges. It made resolving dilemmas a precursor to unlocking capacity. This required substantial analytical capacity for understanding the situation based on limited information, and political capacity for getting buy-in from senior-level decision-makers to act. All this was needed before operational capacity – or the skills required to adequately resource and implement the policy (Wu et al., 2015) – could be developed and improved.

I therefore propose capacity-building as a process that moves from reactivity towards proactivity. It involves three different but interrelated stages: (1) resolving dilemmas to ascertain local governments’ role and goals, (2) developing confidence through knowledge and partnerships, and finally, (3) developing skills to mobilise existing and new resources (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Capacity-building as a process aiming towards proactivity.

I now show empirically how some councils proactively engaged in service provision for people seeking asylum. However, they needed support through a capacity-building process to sustain and expand that proactivity.

Responding proactively to asylum

Indications of proactivity

Goals for an asylum response varied by council and sometimes by departments and/or individuals within each council, especially whether and how a council could go beyond basic statutory duties to support the long-term integration of people seeking asylum. There was confusion around what supporting ‘integration’ could mean in practice, which is unsurprising given various understandings of this term (Rutter, 2015, pp. 66–68) and the challenge of meaningfully integrating a group of people restricted in their rights to work and live where they choose. Within the design labs, one officer supported the idea that councils can help with integration in certain domains, such as improving the arrival experience, but added that “housing and income, we can’t do much about that”. This suggested only minor interventions in the lives of asylum-seekers centred on social connection in lieu of rights claiming and economic stability. But other officers described programmes that went beyond mere hospitality. I consider these initiatives as ‘indications of proactivity’ because these councils took on responsibilities outside those assigned by statutory duties and national asylum policy. They implemented them either by reallocating existing resources or finding new ones. These initiatives include ‘wrap-around services’ in hotels, taking a ‘public health approach’, and providing language support.

So-called ‘wrap-around services’ were offered by at least four of the eleven councils participating in the design labs. ⁵ Councils either commissioned voluntary sector organisations or directly hired people to work within hotels to serve as “on-the-ground outreach support”, liaising between residents and services in the borough. These staff had a flexible and wide remit, from finding local school places to organising wellbeing events and helping people understand the asylum process. While some tasks were nominally the responsibility of the central government’s contractors, these councils felt they had to do more, with one officer saying, “that level of care is just not being provided and I don’t think it probably could be really on the funding and the staffing [the contractors] have”. Councils did not rely on central government grants for these initiatives. One council used public health funding remaining from COVID-19 pandemic response budgets to commission two voluntary sector organisations to work in its four asylum hotels. This had wider impact as it boosted visibility to those organisations, who could advocate for the people they served by raising issues in London-wide meetings with Home Office officials.

Indeed, public health funding and structures underpinned services offered in other boroughs. An East London council housed its response to asylum within its public health department. Partnerships with voluntary sector organisations and local branches of the National Health Service (NHS) led the council to prioritise the establishment of ‘safe surgeries’, meaning that doctors’ offices publicly committed to serving everyone regardless of immigration status to mitigate barriers to healthcare. The council provided a specialised training for frontline staff on how to adapt services for refugees, asylum-seekers, and other migrants. The council also implemented a health needs assessment for asylum-seekers accommodated in hotels, using the findings to tailor services offered and make recommendations to policymakers at different levels of government.

Taking a different approach, a North London council focused on the expansion of a specific service as a mechanism for greater self-reliance: English-as-a-second-language (ESOL) courses. People seeking asylum in the UK are eligible to receive limited funding from the government’s ‘Adult Skills Fund’ to support language training if their case remains pending beyond 6 months. But this council, supported by evidence that starting early improves sustained learning, proactively negotiated with private-sector language providers to accept students as soon as they arrived in the borough. Providers agreed to accept a quota of students every semester, which would later be compensated for by the subsidy. Because this provided a more predictable source of students, the providers furthermore committed funding to the council’s migrant advice service that facilitated the referrals. Making ESOL courses available to people seeking asylum early was stated to have improved peoples’ ability to navigate their local environment during the asylum process and start preparing for the period after receiving status. How this was done – by building partnerships with adult education providers to meet shared objectives – furthermore helped to unlock new (local) funding for services.

I view any initiative that allocates resources towards services specific to people seeking asylum as demonstrating a proactive stance in this policy area. Establishing an entire service or strategic approach furthermore goes beyond exercising discretion. Not all boroughs exhibited this stance, however. For example, a council (that did not participate in the design labs) was proud of its designation as a ‘Borough of Sanctuary’ for its strong refugee resettlement programmes and work for migrants with no recourse to public funds. Nevertheless, it lacked awareness of the needs of asylum-seekers living there and had no plan for asylum support. The work on asylum was comparatively new for them, one officer explained; they assumed the central government would introduce long-term support for those accommodated in hotels and/or eventually shut hotels down altogether. Policy uncertainty therefore precluded them from incorporating asylum into their workplans, limiting the support available to the over 200 asylum-seekers residing in the borough at the time of interview. By building a response despite and in part to mitigate the uncertainty, other councils took a different approach.

Why did councils take steps towards responding to asylum, given limited funding and capacity? Initially officers from councils with more developed responses omitted local integration as an explicit objective. They referenced instead a general borough ‘ethos’ of treating residents equally and with ‘dignity’ and ‘care’. In some councils this language reflected its governing party manifesto, but for others it was invoked as a self-evident principle (one officer even called it a “moral duty”). The disparity in services available to people in refugee resettlement schemes and those seeking asylum were especially pronounced in boroughs hosting both populations. Councils therefore stepped in to mitigate the relative destitution of people seeking asylum and encourage social cohesion between vulnerable groups and in general. These justifications merge several policy frames proposed by Caponio (2014) and developed further by Spencer and Delvino (2019) to justify the inclusion of irregular migrants in welfare programmes: prompted initially by humanitarian imperatives as well as the right to equal care, officers perceived that failing to respond would hinder other goals and hurt the wider community (the ‘socioeconomic frame’). But as workshop discussions progressed, the desire to respond more proactively dominated.

I interpret proactivity as an extension of Spencer and Delvino’s (2019) ‘efficiency’ frame: yes, in some cases it was seen as more cost-effective to include people seeking asylum in mainstream services than to “administer procedures for ensuring their exclusion” (Ibid., p. 37), but that is not the only way to enact efficient public administration. Indeed, for these officers, preparing better for their arrival and longer-term needs would save council resources over time. We can call this a ‘preparedness frame’ driving the motivation for participating in the design labs. For example, all participating councils lacked a dedicated strategy to make decision-making around asylum responses more transparent and sustainable, and sought to rectify this at least in part within the design lab process.

Shifting towards proactivity

I am now addressing the question of how councils in London developed the capacity to respond differently. Despite disagreement on the extent to which councils can meaningfully support the integration of people seeking asylum, design lab participants agreed on the goal of learning from and with other councils to shift to a more proactive approach. Though reactivity and proactivity were originally described as binary within the Asylum Welcome programme objectives, workshop discussions inspired me to conceptualise these as a spectrum. No single activity distinguishes a council’s response as being reactive or proactive; rather, different activities move the response towards proactivity in opposition to contextual elements and capacity gaps that elicit reactivity.

Participants distinguished between reactivity in specific cases and reactivity in general. In specific cases, they defined a reactive response as a one-off response to an unexpected incident or a crisis. As such, it described a practice and an approach to service provision in which there is little space for discretion; choices are very limited. Reactivity in general, or being ‘stuck in a reactive mode’, referred to failures in planning at the institutional (and even systemic) level. This entailed an inability to anticipate arrivals and needs over time, which meant that officers had to face whatever arose unexpectedly and without clear objectives. An officer explained:

our work in this area has always been very reactive, which is understandable to an extent because an emergency happens, people kind of end up in the borough, and we have to address it. But we haven't ever really had a vision for how we would approach this area of work.

Reactivity was partially caused by rapidly changing asylum policies. By mid-2023 various policies introduced by the Home Office sought to reduce the backlog of so-called ‘legacy cases’ of people seeking asylum, such as questionnaires sent to people from five priority countries to initiate ‘Streamlined Asylum Processing’. Subsequently, many asylum-seekers received their refugee status around the same time, placing sudden pressure on council housing departments. One officer expected over 200 people to present as homeless within the following week. He explained that they were frantically trying to work out “just what on earth we are going to do”. Reactivity therefore represents a lack of any ready solution, and moreover, not having the capacity to find a solution.

Reactivity can be interpreted as the lack of capacity, and proactivity as the development of it. As a pan-London stakeholder summarised:

… up until this point, it has been a lot of firefighting, a lot of crises. And it's not enabled people to think ahead too well; they may be thinking ahead, but they don't have capacity to actually implement those plans. So I think some of the structures that we're trying to create now, hopefully, it will allow for that space to think a bit more about long term strategy.

Here, the process of thinking ahead is an important but insufficient marker of proactivity; developing the capacity to enact plans is equally needed.

Broadly, proactive responses address short term needs while aiming towards longer term objectives and outcomes. These could more holistically consider needs of people seeking asylum based on a deeper understanding of their situation and anticipated changes to the policy landscape. Though the concept emerged from practitioners, it evokes two ideas familiar to local government scholars: the longstanding emphasis on creating ‘responsive local governments’ that learn based on feedback from their environment and innovate by critically analysing problems (Stewart, 1974), and the shift towards efficiency and accountability promoted by new public management approaches (Lowndes, 1997). Proactivity is also decidedly future-looking, aiming to be one step ahead of problems before they arise.

However, the reactivity/proactivity spectrum alone does not explain what moves councils towards proactivity. They need to intentionally solve problems at both operational and strategic levels to overcome policy impasses. Hence, a key stage in capacity-building involved grappling with dilemmas that officers perceived as impediments to their proactivity. For some councils, solutions to these dilemmas bolstered a rationale for responding at all, while for others they supported expanding their response beyond statutory obligations and prioritising new activities. Resolving these dilemmas shaped how these local authorities understood their role within migration policymaking and integration work.

Affirming ‘a local need’

A challenge all councils faced was the movement of the asylum-seeking population. The asylum accommodation system creates this situation as asylum-seekers cannot choose where they are housed, ⁶ and they are often moved with little notice. ⁷ Accordingly, people may struggle to connect with their local authority before they are sent to live somewhere else; the constant threat of moving was seen to impede ties to one’s location. While this has dire consequences on short-term wellbeing (Refugee Council, 2022), this also presents logistical difficulties: local authorities and service providers struggled to plan. For example, local authorities worked with local NHS branches to ensure that everyone is given a health check when they arrive at a hotel. But they could not estimate how many would be arriving and how many would stay close enough for follow-up care, making it unclear when and how to set up these checks. For one council, arrivals ranged from a dozen to a couple hundred or even a thousand, depending on the day.

A council officer felt this rendered people seeking asylum into a ‘transient population’:

Compared to the resettlement programme (the ‘gold standard’), which has a strong foundation and link with the voluntary sector, gives enough information to plan and follow individuals throughout their journey, and is funded, the asylum seeker population is inherently transient. There’s no way of knowing how long they will be staying in accommodation, so you are planning for people ‘without a particular cohort’. When you then talk about local authority services, [they] tend to respond to a local need and you haven't necessarily got a local need. You've got a transient population that are coming in and going out. How do you build an infrastructure around a transient population? It’s difficult to have any other response than a reactive one.

This creates a spatial dilemma, in which local authorities must decide what does and does not constitute ‘a local need’. This officer questions how long a person stays in the borough before their needs becomes the responsibility of the council. The officer furthermore assumes that accommodating a non-traditional ‘local need’ would be costly.

The diversity of the population in addition to its ‘churn’ makes it harder to build a relationship. A different council’s officer described:

that focus on forming that relationship with a mass of individuals who are all very, very different and getting moved around all over the place, which is ultimately one of the most important things, but also present with this churn and turnover, one of the most difficult.

The workshops largely dispelled the view that providing services to people seeking asylum was operationally too difficult. A conceptual shift facilitated this reframing. In contrast to their ‘transience’, one council proposed considering people seeking asylum there as ‘long-term residents’:

As long as they’re in [London Borough] we consider them to be long-term residents because that approach allows us to be less reactive. The programmes we put in place will anyway benefit them in the longer term too, even if they get moved out. If they go elsewhere then those skills and knowledge is transferrable to another borough.

Notably, this officer saw being less reactive as a worthy goal unto itself. This affirmation not only of asylum-seekers being ‘residents’ but moreover ‘long-term residents’ helped to establish consensus that the local authority could and should take responsibility for their care even beyond immediate needs. This helped them make the case internally for using existing funding for their wrap-around services. Additionally, this position reimagines integration as belonging to a different spatial scale: newcomers integrate into the UK rather than into a specific local authority. It posits that any services and support provided to people seeking asylum in one location still helps with integration overall.

By taking a more holistic geographical view of integration, participants saw the benefits of intervening despite the churn. This conceptual reframing made it easier to discuss a variety of interventions later in the process. It provided the rationale for developing welcome packs for newcomers, as well as advising on accessing employment and the private rental sector for people soon expecting refugee status, regardless of whether they planned to leave the borough or even the city (a likely outcome given the high cost of housing in London). Adapting to churn informed the process for operating more proactively: strategies and plans had to be flexible enough to withstand changing numbers, but also the changing needs of people seeking asylum over time.

Councils were also pushing back on the churn, albeit with limited success. One council officer described an asylum-seeker in a serious health condition. The Home Office directed this person to be relocated to a different borough, but this person’s general practitioner refused to discharge the patient. The council, working as an intermediary, requested and was granted a 14-day stay for that person to recover (after which they were moved). The officer expected the continuation of care to be tenuous after that point and bemoaned the inability to follow-up with patients once they left the borough. This suggests that churn not only causes difficulty for planning services, but also disrupts service provision while breaking the link to the council. A lobbying letter signed by twenty-two London councils outlined why the churn was damaging both to asylum-seeker wellbeing and to the provision of support (Royal Borough of Greenwich, 2023). Reframing asylum-seeker needs as ‘local needs’ led to proactivity in several ways: it justified clearer council responsibility and intervention and supported wider objections to asylum policy. However, this letter and the limited powers of the council to prevent relocation, even for health reasons, also reminds us that some forms of violence – here, the forced movement of peoples within the United Kingdom – simply cannot be addressed by local government alone.

Monitoring central government

Issues around ‘safeguarding’ exemplifies how council officers grappled with their relationship to central government. Design lab participants agreed that at a minimum local government needed to meet its statutory requirements in developing their responses, which included providing adequate safeguards for its more vulnerable residents such as people seeking asylum. The practice of safeguarding, defined generally as “protecting people’s right to live in safety, free from abuse and neglect” (Local Government Association, 2019, p. 3), is broader than a duty to care and can include activities seeking to mitigate vulnerabilities that could lead to exploitation, human trafficking, or domestic violence. This area of work is therefore explicitly proactive. Council officers interpreted it as a core role of local government for which they had substantial expertise that the Home Office did not. Officers debated how to ensure Home Office contractors abided by minimum safeguarding standards. This meant holding them accountable to the terms of their contracts but also highlighting potential risks faced by people seeking asylum and the ways in which Home Office policies were not being carried out as intended. Hence, safeguarding created a clear rationale for questioning Home Office policies and monitoring the work of other providers.

Three instances discussed in the workshops show what kinds of issues prompt such monitoring from councils. The first pushed back on the conditions of new hotels. An East London council was consulted by the Home Office about the procurement of a hotel, to which an officer expressed surprise (“It’s the first time that we were actually consulted, if I’m honest”). The council conducted a risk assessment to provide an informed reply. They notably involved a range of partners: the council’s Chief Executive fed into the process as did the local branch of the Metropolitan police. Criteria within a ‘safeguarding toolkit’ developed by a North London council informed the assessment, showing collaboration between councils. In the end, the council objected to the procurement on account of prior links with people smuggling networks and other safety issues. The priority the council placed on safeguarding standards and the multistakeholder engagement of its risk assessment enabled the objection.

When the Home Office announced that room-sharing would become a requirement in hotel accommodation in June 2023 (UK Home Office, 2023b), several councils raised concerns from their ‘environmental health teams’ about the risk of overcrowding. One council managed to arrange an in-person meeting with Home Office contacts in which its officers physically held up a tape measure to underscore the absurdity of placing beds so close together. This was perceived as a particularly effective way of raising objections so they could not be ignored.

A third instance of a council asserting a monitoring role involved the interrogation of activities by hotel managers. Council officers were concerned about the low numbers of notifications they received for incidents in the hotels, known as ‘safeguarding referrals’. As one officer described, any safeguarding issues reported to Clearsprings Ready Homes are escalated directly to the Home Office “so in that case we don’t really know what comes of it”. Instead, the process preferred by local authorities is to have safeguarding concerns referred to their Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs that are specifically organised for this purpose. Council officers suspected that hotel management did not explain this process to asylum-seeking residents and/or bypassed or were unaware of council protocols.

To solve this problem, councils saw a need to build a relationship with hotel managers to nudge them towards improved practices. One West London council designed a training on safeguarding, especially for identifying instances of domestic violence. This was well received by hotel staff. Though the officer reported that the hotel management has its own training, hotel managers were keen for training from the council to “upgrade and extend their knowledge”. This training served as a relationship-building opportunity and enabled the council to better understand the extent of hotel staff expertise in working with people seeking asylum. An officer explained:

Hearing their views and how they look after residents and the terminology they use, I personally think they would benefit from broader knowledge. I think that would inform the way they behave and their principles in hotels so they would not need council training in the future.

The relationship helped the council influence the behaviour of a central government subcontractor and key stakeholder in asylum accommodation who has direct impact on the everyday experiences of people seeking asylum. This activity can be viewed as increasing proactivity because its intent was to prevent safeguarding concerns, build partnerships, and improve overall service delivery long-term.

Asserting a monitoring role, however, came with substantial tensions. In response to the description of the lack of safeguarding expertise amongst hotel staff, an officer from a different council proclaimed, “But this is totally in contravention of their contract!” Still, delivering a training to make up for these gaps was justifiable because it supported the council’s work and safeguarding obligations. Another council had done the same: “We also delivered a training to them on this. We know that we shouldn’t have to do it but we also know that it would improve their work”. Council officers debated the scope of their monitoring role because of the dilemma it presented: do they continue to use limited forms of influence to pressure for wider policy changes, or do they attempt to fix the problems in the interim? The latter would risk accusations of a duplication of resources and potentially justify central government ‘offloading’ certain responsibilities to councils without providing the necessary funding and support.

Asserting a distinct role for themselves implied pushing back on certain aspects of asylum policy. By contrast, holding central government accountable to their policies and obligations implied tacit agreement to some degree with asylum policy and its terms. They acknowledged this tension by taking, as one council officer put it, a “dual role of holding people accountable to what they should be providing, but also collaborating”. Council officers are making ‘critical judgments’ that are prerequisites for ‘strategic work’ (Healey, 2009, p. 440) as they confront and resolve dilemmas facing their decision-making. Debate was necessary to navigate these tensions before councils could identify how to allocate their existing capacity and expand it to implement their responses.

Capacity and confidence

The design labs built new skills and competences, per Wu et al.’s (2015) definition, especially through pilot projects adapted to the needs of each borough. These enabled reflexive learning through experimentation and information-exchange (Weihmayer, 2024). One pilot project meriting deeper analysis involved a complete overhaul of the council’s approach. An officer in this council described its ineffectiveness when a hotel started accommodating people seeking asylum in her borough: “Even with a lot of notice, we didn’t know what we could possibly do about it”. Her challenges were both internal and external, having little “senior buy-in” to develop a response due to unclear priorities of the council’s political and executive leadership. One underlying issue was that people did not understand this policy area or what kind of work would be required.

This necessitated building confidence to make judgments and propose new ideas, implying that capacity and confidence are closely intertwined. Confidence-building stemmed from learning and gaining expertise. This officer explained:

so the idea that it ends up not just being three people in the middle of the council that know but you've got a quite a wide, potentially a larger raft of people who feel confident they've got the essential facts, which means you've got more people you can work with.

As a first step, this officer invited over fifty staff from across the council to the introductory briefings on asylum that accompanied the design lab process. Spreading knowledge enabled inter-departmental working, helping her to create multi-sectoral coordination platforms, meeting: weekly with the health, police and hotel management teams, monthly with a wide range of council departments, and monthly with voluntary sector partners to coordinate and complement services. The council furthermore bolstered external partnerships by offering grants to support the wider services in the community. In conjunction with these strengthened partnerships and new governance structures, this officer used remaining funding from refugee resettlement programmes to hire a Coordinator, Manager, and five officers to make what she called a “permanent team for asylum”. They aimed to support integration and prevent homelessness, as opposed to managing crises and housing issues, which she framed as saving costs by “prioritising proactive work”. Convincing the council’s Housing Department to also contribute resources and time remained a major challenge. Externally, she created space to coordinate meetings with the Home Office and Clearsprings Ready Homes, where she felt empowered to advocate for the needs of asylum-seekers in her borough by showing patterns of behaviour that also appeared in other boroughs in London. She placed pressure by rigorously documenting the meetings and following up until actions were taken to resolve each issue, calling this a practice of “minuting and logging”.

For this council struggling to gain support for asylum work within its departments and leadership, developing new knowledge and partnerships internally and externally contributed to, as a Greater London Authority officer called it, a “capacity ecosystem”, whereby councils gained some leverage to exert pressure on other levels of government. Such examples show that confidence-building measures through knowledge-building and partnerships can motivate coalitions to demand wider change. Other frameworks on capacity support this idea, complementing the development of skills and competences with the ability for both learning and mobilising stakeholders towards collective action (Busengdal et al., 2023; Healey et al., 2000; Van Popering-Verkerk et al., 2022).

Implications and limitations

In urban governance literature, Bulkeley et al. (2018) describe ‘urban living laboratories’ like the design labs as transformative spaces. They prompt us to ask how these spaces “identify conditions that require some form of improvement and seek to establish capacity in order to observe and document such changes for different forms of political purpose” (p. 322). The improvement promoted through the Asylum Welcome programme envisioned a different and proactive practice of asylum response. While this alone cannot achieve systemic change in asylum policy, I have shown how it at least counters the absence of a role for local governments within asylum policy and strengthens arguments for integration.

In the design labs, people seeking asylum were reframed as entailing a ‘local need’ embedded within local geographies; they are not exceptions to the (local) state’s duties of care. This counters an asylum system designed to prevent integration by subjecting people seeking asylum to a parallel and inadequate system of service delivery (Bakker et al., 2016; Darling, 2022a). Council proactivity creates actions that facilitate access to services for migrants in spite of, and to a degree mitigating, restrictive national legal and policy frameworks (Spencer and Delvino, 2019, p. 27). While local authorities remain concerned that they are duplicating some central government services, they are also extending them to incorporate wrap-around care, language training, and other forms of support that can make the eventual journey towards integration a little bit easier, albeit with very limited powers for wider policy change.

But Bulkeley et al. (2018) remind us that urban living laboratories are agnostic on whether the results they produce are indeed progressive or regressive. The councils participating in the design labs demonstrated progress within their pilot projects towards improving their service offer by making them more comprehensive, better tailored, and/or easier to access, among others. I lacked the data to monitor these projects over time however, and hence cannot verify whether and how these efforts meaningfully changed the situation for their beneficiaries. Furthermore, participation in the design labs and a published toolkit of asylum response strategies does not preclude inaction or regressive responses elsewhere.

Conclusion

London borough councils are transforming their approach to asylum. Though their strategic objectives and role were unclear at the outset of the Asylum Welcome programme, the councils participating all sought to respond more proactively. In addition to humanitarian and human rights motivations, a need for proactivity fits within a ‘preparedness’ policy frame. This extends Spencer and Delvino’s (2019) work because efficiency here means reducing costs by pre-empting asylum-seeker needs, rather than resorting to time-consuming and oftentimes insufficient one-off responses to a crisis. I explain capacity-building as a process that enables proactivity. This entails first resolving dilemmas to better define the role and goals of local governments in asylum, then building confidence through learning and partnerships, and finally developing skills and competences to implement policies. I thereby offer something new to urban governance debates that omit the process by which capacity is built (Van Popering-Verkerk et al., 2022).

Council officers are not simply framing policy agendas and convening networks of voluntary and civil society organisations. They are overcoming dilemmas in the local governments’ role in a highly restrictive policy area. They are also building knowledge and partnerships and expanding resources in new ways, moving beyond the mere exercise of discretion. Most importantly, through this process, they are doing political work that reshapes the role of local government and pushes back on key tenants of UK asylum policy, especially the need for and possibility to support integration. Rather than undervalue local authority efforts to expand discretionary decision-making, I view these as contributing to a wider critique of a contradictory and inadequately funded system.

But changing practices alone have a limited effect on the wellbeing of people seeking asylum, especially if those new practices are only evident in a small number of local authorities concentrated in large cities. Yet it is an important first step. As the local councillor who spoke at the launch event said:

We can't do this as London alone. The system needs to work for all of the UK…We have hope that we can show central government what a decent offer can be. We will take messages back to central government of the depth of experience we are seeing here today.