Service delivery models

The following four chapters set out the different service delivery models developed by local authorities and how they achieve the key elements identified in chapter 2.

3.1 Overview

In response to our survey and interviews, local authorities from across the UK told us how they deliver services in a way which best suits their needs. The structures they described can be most easily understood as having one of the following:

Dedicated NRPF social workers or a social work team
Dedicated NRPF caseworkers or a casework team
No dedicated workers

These models of service delivery are described at chapter 4 (dedicated NRPF social workers), chapter 5 (dedicated NRPF caseworkers) and chapter 6 (no dedicated workers). Any challenges that local authorities have found them to present are highlighted in these chapters.

A common structure is to have a dedicated NRPF social worker or social work team. Dedicated social work teams will sit in either adult or children’s social care, carrying out assessments and implementing care plans for the households with no recourse to public funds which they support.

Dedicated teams of caseworkers sit either inside or outside of social services and will deliver assessments and support services in partnership with social care teams. Dedicated teams can either handle cases from across social services, or solely handle either families or adults with care and support needs.

Councils without dedicated NRPF social workers or teams will hold cases for families with no recourse to public funds that are provided with accommodation and financial support within wider child in need caseloads. The same approach will be taken in adult social care, with individual care teams meeting specific care and support needs, including through the provision of accommodation and subsistence services when required. In this guidance we have referred to this as a ‘dispersed’ model. Councils with a dispersed approach put oversight, supervision and training structures in place to ensure a high-quality, consistent approach across multiple teams.

The suitability of a certain structure for each council depends on their particular circumstances, primarily the size of their caseload, the strengths of their current local and regional services for people with no recourse to public funds, and what expertise, skills, and teams exist in the rest of the organisation. Local authorities with larger caseloads very often choose to have dedicated NRPF workers or teams, be that social workers, caseworkers, or administrators. So long as the main elements of NRPF service provision are in place, as outlined in chapter 2, councils can decide how to best to arrange their response, with each approach offering its own set of risks and opportunities.

3.2 Dedicated workers and teams

Many councils have created dedicated roles or teams comprising principally of either social workers or caseworkers and almost always supported by administrative staff as described in chapter 7. These workers and teams deliver social services support to people with no recourse to public funds, reflecting the specific nature of the support requirements of families and adults subject to immigration restrictions. Dedicated workers and teams are particularly common amongst councils with a larger demand for those services.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore the differences between dedicated social workers or social work teams and non-social-work teams or caseworkers, with the later sometimes being based outside of the directorate responsible for the delivery of social care functions.

In general, councils reported the following benefits of having dedicated workers or teams, regardless of the department in which they are based:

Specialisation and development

Dedicated workers and teams can build their knowledge and experience in assessing the needs of households with no recourse to public funds and providing care, which is not typical to general social work practice, such as administering subsistence payments, sourcing temporary accommodation, and helping families to address immigration matters.
Staff overseeing NRPF cases can further specialise in particular areas, such as hospital discharge or supporting survivors of domestic abuse, further expanding a council’s ability to effectively support vulnerable residents.
When dedicated NRPF officers are placed within a local authority’s refugee and migrant service, expertise of immigration-related issues and how these intersect with other areas can be shared and developed.
Training requirements for some generic social work teams and supervisors will decrease as people with no recourse to public funds at risk of destitution will not form part of their caseloads and they do not require the knowledge and skills to provide that specialist support.
Centralised teams may have more autonomy to commission services, such as immigration advice provision, when this has been proven to benefit the performance of the service.

Improving council-wide practice

Dedicated NRPF officers or social workers will become a point of contact in the council and can build strong relationships with internal and external partners related to the provision of services to people with no recourse to public funds throughout the local authority.
NRPF officers can share knowledge and foster best practice in the rest of the organisation by providing basic training and facilitating knowledge sharing.

Oversight

Particularly when it sits in a wider refugee and migrant service, an NRPF team is a natural place to oversee and improve services for people with no recourse to public funds and can lead on immigration-related aspects of wider issues, such as trafficking or violence against women and girls.
Having dedicated teams or workers can make it easier to track spend and trends in caseloads, allowing managers to identify and implement service development strategies to reduce accommodation and subsistence costs in the long term, such as improving pathways off support and move-on processes.

However, councils must consider how they can address some potential challenges of having a dedicated team or individual that delivers accommodation and financial support to households with no recourse to public funds, such as:

Ensuring that broader social work considerations are not compromised by creating specialisms in delivering services for households with no recourse to public funds and that other needs are not missed.
Support for people with no recourse to public funds must continue to be one part of the council executing its social care duties through the statutory assessment and review process.
Having a dedicated team can lead to gatekeeping as pressure on services leads to more stringent criteria for support, as identified in the COMPAS research report, Understanding Migrant Destitution in the UK.
Retaining organisational knowledge and skills if a sole dedicated worker leaves the council.
A lack of basic understanding of the implications of the NRPF condition amongst other social work teams.

When operating dedicated services, it is necessary to ensure that there are written processes and procedures to define job roles, referral routes and service expectations and that these are agreed at director level. Written policies or procedures must be well communicated to staff and periodically reviewed, with escalation routes in place, should processes not be followed.