Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, which local authorities have made representations to his Department on the new asylum accommodation contracts; and whether his Department has received representations on those contracts from the Local Government Association.

To continue to meet UKVI’s obligation to provide accommodation & support to destitute asylum seekers, the Asylum Accommodation and Support Transformation (AAST) project has been established to design, develop and procure the future model for asylum accommodation and support, replacing the existing COMPASS arrangements when they expire in Sept 2019.

Since the establishment of the project in the autumn of 2016, there has been extensive engagement with strategic stakeholders, including Strategic Migration Partnerships, Local Authorities and Non-Government Organisations to identify a range of enhancements and improvements to the existing model which have been reflected in the design of the next generation of contracts.

We estimate that there have been over 60 separate stakeholder events or written exercises undertaken since autumn 2016. Details of the feedback provided by individual stakeholders from this engagement could only be provided at disproportionate cost by examination of individual correspondence, event minutes and records.