Okay.
Yes, that's the one.
So the gentleman has been granted refugee status.
He's from Iran.
We've got many Iranian clients here
and sadly many of them are [in the] same situations: street homeless.
We managed to do his universal credit.
What I'm going to do now is a professional referral housing option team.
He came here that [was] wise of him to come early to do this one,
but the reality is going to be street homeless, because there is people before him.
It's a big waiting list policy.
Where will you go?
I don’t know.
I don’t have anywhere.
We have these, it's a bivi bag that comes right up to keep you dry,
if you need one of these?
Our service, for most of its 21-year history, has been a celebratory service.
It feels like we're turning into a refugee homeless centre.
So for me to fill out the housing referral forms,
I’m going to get you to sign here for me.
The work we do here is a mixture of casework with people who've been granted refugee status
or other forms of leave to remain.
And then we help them with their onward integration into life, into the UK.
The backlog has built up and up and up, particularly since the pandemic,
and that the government target seems to be getting through this backlog by Christmas.
We might have had one, two or three people in a year
in the past that maybe struggled to access housing,
and in the past eight weeks we've had over 100 cases present to us.
We know there's hundreds more to come.
A lot of pressure – busy line.
In the last three months,
homelessness has increased dramatically.
When you being granted refugee status, you have to leave the accommodation
within seven days.
It used to be before like 28 days.
Even that 28 days wasn't enough.
Instead of increasing the days, they decrease the days.
Yeah.
So this is a local park here in Liverpool.
It's not far from our centre as well.
Sometimes in this place you see people sleeping here, rough sleeping.
Those people are our clients.
By the time you are waiting for a refugee status, the prime time of your life passed.
So that means your life has been destroyed.
When they come here, they come with the hope
that [they] can restart and rebuild their new life here.
We should help them to engage in this community.
So this building is designated just to help asylum seekers and refugees,
and it’s a few charities here.
That's a class here for English class.
So it's important to learn the language,
to communicate, to integrate, to build a new life.
Without the language, you can do nothing here.
You learned English here?
In this building, yeah, 13 years ago.
Yeah!
I decided to come to the UK because of them,
what happened in Sudan and what is continually happened now.
Sudan in a bad situation, now the people of Sudan facing war
and people being displaced and discrimination,
there is many reason why we left our country, Sudan.
The first time I came here,
it was so difficult for me even to communicate with the guys here
at the reception, because of the lack of the language.
But now it’s okay.
So here, biggest room in the building.
This is where we have our Christmas ceremony
People who is different faith as well, they celebrate here.
And also we've got the choir.
We speak different languages, but the music, it has its own languages.
So everyone can understand this song and the music.
I've decided to work with refugees because I felt welcome here.
People gave me a sense of belonging, and I want to pay back
for the Liverpool community or the British community in general.
The government target seems to be getting through this backlog by Christmas.
It just feels like a helpless situation.
It's a national issue.
It's not just locally to Merseyside.
I think a lot of people are very resistant to the idea of seeing an actual refugee camp.
It feels like that's what's going to happen.
I generally think we're going to see people dying in the parks and on the streets.
There needs to be some really serious thinking about how we try and resolve this.
We've granted these people refugee status,
let's get on and treat them like human beings, just like you and me.