At a church in East London this month, Imogen Moore-Shelley balanced her 6-month-old on her hip as she scrawled an important message on a poster: “Useful information for sponsors.”
She then handed her marker to Natalia, a Ukrainian woman who had moved into Moore-Shelley’s home a week earlier. Natalia then wrote the message in Ukrainian as people filtered into the church for a luncheon bringing together refugees and the Londoners opening their homes to them.
Natalia and Moore-Shelley’s story — of a woman fleeing war and finding shelter with a stranger 1,300 miles away — served as a hopeful example of a smooth transition to safety in Britain. But not every experience with a British visa programme meant for Ukrainians fleeing war has been so easy, and many of the sponsors gathered at the church, unable to get clear answers from the government, were looking to one another for advice.
Weeks after Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, and amid widespread criticism that it was not doing enough to help, the British government began Homes for Ukraine, a programme meant to offer Ukrainians a quick path to safety. But despite tens of thousands of Britons having expressed interest in playing host, the rollout has been painfully slow.
Aid groups, potential hosts and Ukrainians say the programme is full of pitfalls, including a difficult application process and significant delays in visa processing. They also express concerns about safety and about a lack of support in gaining access to schools and other vital services in Britain.
The programme was supposed to be a response to earlier criticism that Britain had been slow to respond to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. Initially, as members of the European Union threw borders open, Britain, which left the bloc in 2021, allowed only those with immediate family in the country to even apply for a visa.
Homes for Ukraine was intended to broaden the British response, even if the programme still required cutting some red tape, including a condition that hosts make direct contact with Ukrainians who need housing. Problems with this matching process have grown.
As of May 16, about 53,800 Ukrainians had arrived in Britain, with 20,800 joining their immediate family members and 33,000 arriving under the sponsorship programme.
More than 6.4 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began, according to the United Nations.
Mark Lillicrap, 58, who lives in St Albans, a town north of London, and his wife have been trying for seven weeks to get visas for a family currently in Hamburg, Germany, but he said the process had been “terrible” amid “staggering bureaucracy.”
Two weeks ago, he was told that both parents had been approved but that their baby — who does not have a passport because he was born only weeks before the war began — needed to be seen at a visa application centre hundreds of miles from Hamburg. Many others described similar obstacles.
The luncheon at the church was intended to help build community, but it was also a reflection of the exasperation felt by many sponsors.
Moore-Shelley, 34, who organised the event, said that she and her husband had felt powerless while watching the horrors of the war unfold on the news and that opening up their home was “a small way that we could do something.”
But Moore-Shelley described a confusing application process, a weeks long visa wait and a struggle to find someone to host. Eventually, her husband asked a Ukrainian waiter at a local cafe he frequents if he knew anyone who needed help.
The waiter, Sasha Druz, 27, put the couple in touch with Natalia, whom they sponsored. When Natalia arrived this month, no checks by the local council had been conducted on the couple’s home.
“We’ve just kind of cracked on, basically,” said Moore-Shelley, who, along with support and translation help from Druz, is helping Natalia navigate life in Britain. Natalia asked that only her first name be used over concerns about the safety of her family in Ukraine.
Beyond the programme being cumbersome and mired with delays, there are also concerns about safety. The ad hoc matching — including through unofficial websites and Facebook groups — makes the system vulnerable to exploitation.
The UN refugee agency expressed concern in April after reports that vulnerable Ukrainians were being targeted in Britain by unfit or predatory hosts and called for better safeguarding and vetting.
A government spokesperson said the programme was “designed with safeguards in place, including checks by the Home Office and the local council,” adding that Ukrainian refugees should have access to health care, education, benefits and job support “on the same footing as UK nationals.”
But local councils say that they are struggling to keep up with those checks and that their resources are already stretched thin.
James Jamieson, chair of the Local Government Association, which represents 350 councils across England and Wales, said in a statement that authorities needed better, more timely information on Ukrainian arrivals from both the government and the hosts to provide adequate support and to ensure safety.
In a statement, the government said it was aware of application delays of more than a month and called them “unacceptable,” noting that changes had been made to speed up the process. One frustrated group of would-be sponsors is now taking legal action against the Home Office, which oversees the Homes for Ukraine programme, saying that promises to streamline were not enough.
Kitty Hamilton and Katherine Klinger, friends from London, are part of the legal action and have been holding twice-weekly demonstrations outside the Home Office in London with the group Vigil for Visas.
“There are all sorts of different ways in which this particular scheme, as lovely and generous as it looks from the outside, is actually not particularly well-designed,” Hamilton said. - New York Times
Megan Specia
The writer is a correspondent on the International Desk in London
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