Still waiting

Characteristically high-handed, Blunkett dictated that the process would be completed by 1 May – tomorrow. Councils were left with the task of sorting out the applicants' accommodation and, as revealed in Housing Today earlier this month, now face a bill of up to £50m (HT 16 April, page 9). So far, however, only half of the families have been contacted by the Home Office and the operation is expected to run on into July.

Civil servants remain cagey about the details of the programme, even though a parliamentary question has been tabled in an effort to pin them down and the Association of London Government is demanding a meeting with the immigration minister Des Browne to ask for extra cash.

So just why has Blunkett's grand gesture gone horribly wrong?

Keith Best, chief executive of the Immigration Advisory Service – a charity that provides lawyers for asylum seekers, believes the move was flawed from the start.

"It was a cynical decision to reduce the amount of money going out on benefits, dreamed up at the last minute without a great deal of thought," he says.

The official line is that the Home Office wanted to clear its backlog and start with a clean slate, but the figures bear out Best's belief. The amnesty could save the Home Office £180m a year: it was supporting 12,000 families who had applied for asylum before the formation of the National Asylum Support Service in October 2002 and had got stuck in the system. This cost £15,000 a year per family.

A further 3000 families were mired in the same backlog but supporting themselves, bringing the total number to 15,000.

Following Blunkett's surprise announcement, the Home Office's immigration and nationality department scrambled together a team to start on the arduous task of identifying and notifying the eligible families. The vast majority are in London, with a handful in dispersal areas such as Birmingham and Manchester. The team had to trawl through databases to locate the names and addresses of those who might be suitable and cross-reference their files to check they did not have any criminal convictions or other issues that would disqualify them from the amnesty.

It was a cynical decision dreamed up at the last minute without a great deal of thought

Keith Best, Immigration Advisory Service

"Six months was a wildly optimistic target," says a local government source who sits on one of the multi-agency steering groups overseeing the process. "In fact, the programme didn't really get started until January – although that did give us a while to identify some of the costs."

The source does concede that local authorities' work with private landlords to change tenancies and rent levels, allowing refugees to stay in their current homes where possible, is going better than expected. It's a complicated process, though, that could cost up to £50m.

With its programme for contacting eligible families continuing to fall behind schedule throughout the early months of 2004, the immigration and nationality department soon encountered a new problem. Only half of the people they were writing to got back to them – probably because the letters were written in English and many asylum seekers do not speak the language, let alone write it.

"In communicating with asylum seekers, letters in English are not going to be sufficient," says Bharti Patel, head of policy at the Refugee Council. In belated recognition of this, immigration and nationality department staff and local government officials have started to visit the families to make sure the paperwork is done properly.

The difficulties and delays have had a disastrous impact on the very people the amnesty was supposed to help. Those who know they are eligible have been told not to contact the Home Office but to wait for their letter, leaving them in limbo. Keith Best knows one couple who have jobs waiting for them when their leave to remain comes through; many more have had to delay starting education courses or training as they wait by the letterbox.

"These people have been put at a considerable disadvantage," says Best, although he could not give numbers.

In an attempt to chivvy along the Home Office, he has prompted conservative MP Humphrey Malins to table a parliamentary question asking for details of exactly how many people have been contacted, how many have been granted amnesty and how many are still waiting to hear. "The Home Office won't give out any information," he says, "so we've had to do it this way round."

Civil servants refused to give Housing Today up-to-date information of how the amnesty has progressed. But ALG figures show that 7500 families have had letters telling them they qualify and inviting them to apply; 2000 families have completed the process and been awarded indefinite leave to remain.