Inspire project

Five lessons from the Homes for Ukraine scheme

The approach to housing 160,000 displaced people in a matter of months has some valuable lessons that could help health organisations hoping to collaborate and have a big impact.

What’s the Homes for Ukraine scheme got to do with the NHS?

‘Collaboration’ is seen as the future of healthcare, both within the UK and globally. But how often do we look outside of health to think about what effective collaboration looks like in other sectors?

At Kaleidoscope we’re fascinated by the art and science of working together. We’ve spent the past seven years understanding what this means at a variety of different levels – whether between teams, between different professional groups, or between whole organisations. We’re often struck by how consistent the themes we see are, both between these different types of collaboration, but also between what works within health, and in other sectors.

Yet health is often (curiously) incurious about what goes on beyond its walls. If we’re serious about our ambitions for what good collaborative working can achieve, this needs to change. This report is a contribution to this debate: taking an example of collaboration between national government, local government, charitable groups and tens of thousands of individuals, and understanding what lessons this can have for collaboration in the NHS.

We worked with Paul Morrison, Director of the Homes for Ukraine scheme, to understand how collaboration can be used as an approach to achieve goals of the highest importance, all played out in the glare of intense political and public scrutiny.

We wanted to understand how collaboration informed the leadership of the Homes for Ukraine Scheme, its successes and the lessons learned for future initiatives.

We were keen to see how our thinking and approach at Kaleidoscope – including our model of characteristics of high-performing collaborations – aligned with Paul’s experiences.

At a time when talk of an ‘NHS crisis’ is common, we were also interested in how collaboration can flourish even at times when operational pressures can all too easily crowd out the time and space necessary for effective working together.

Here, we offer lessons and approaches applicable far beyond the civil service context of the Homes for Ukraine scheme, and provide learnings for the health and care sector.

The starting point

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Millions of people were displaced and the immediate impact was thousands of people fleeing to neighbouring countries.

In the UK, there was strong public support to respond rapidly and assist European allies more immediately impacted by this large movement of people, many of whom were being housed in temporary, unsatisfactory accommodation.

The Homes for Ukraine Scheme was set up to enable members of the public to sponsor and host Ukrainian refugees. Under the scheme, the Home Office granted visas to any Ukrainians who had sponsorship from a UK citizen who was willing to provide them with accommodation for six months.

To be as efficient as possible, all that was required for sponsoring individuals was passport identification, consent to be checked on, and for their details to be provided to local authorities to coordinate local public services, including education and healthcare. As a gesture of recognition, £350 was provided to each sponsor.

Innovative approach

The matching processes were left to individuals and non-governmental stakeholders to coordinate. Such an approach is highly innovative and to a large degree countercultural to civil service, charity and government sectors used to processes where government is responsible for the matching and processing of cases.

More than 160,0000 Ukrainian refugees were housed with UK hosts over the next few months. As a result of the scheme, they were provided with not only accommodation but also a personal connection to a community and a support structure.

Improving interactions is crucial to effective collaboration that aims to enable people and organisations to work together to achieve common goals.

We determined early on that communities should play a defining role in the programme and that this would reflect the public support for the effort.

While the response was fast, the approach had long roots. The important part of changing systems is seeking to understand the interactions and relationships between components rather than optimising the individual components themselves.

Improving interactions (and relationships) is crucial to effective collaboration that aims to enable people and organisations to work together to achieve common goals.

Learning from previous limitations

Prior to Ukraine, the most recent UK experience of a major movement of people for humanitarian reasons was the relocation of several thousand people from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.

The approach taken then relied heavily on case-working processes. It was operated by central government and included teams whose role was to try to match the refugees to specific available locations and local authorities. The matching processes became a significant bottleneck and meant that many families had lengthy stays in hotels while waiting for permanent accommodation.

The limitations of and lessons from that centrally coordinated approach were understood by those developing the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

Collaboration the key

Working with Paul, we sought to understand what worked and how collaboration was made so central to the scheme’s design.

Five lessons stood out as key to the scheme’s success then, and relevant to the challenges being faced within the NHS, and wider public sector, today:

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