Afghan families living in the region after fleeing persecution from the Taliban have been warned they face being left homeless, councillors have heard.

A meeting of North Yorkshire Council’s corporate and partnerships scrutiny committee heard councillors were worried a load of the refugees would “present as homeless” in the coming months after hearing the Home Office was determined to close all its controversial refugee bridging hotels before the end of October.

The meeting heard the authority’s officers were planning “for the worst case scenario” where up to 90 people still living at a bridging hotel in Scarborough would become homeless on August 16.

Officers told the committee in recent years refugees had been impacted by “a tunnel of chaos” and while poor countries surrounding the turmoil were still taking the majority of refugees, with nearly four million in Turkey alone, some councils had not taken any refugees.

The meeting in County Hall, Northallerton heard North Yorkshire was taking part in several different schemes to offer homes for refugees, including one in which well over a thousand Ukrainians had arrived in the county.

Although North Yorkshire’s councils had agreed to find homes for 200 people by 2024, the Home Office had put a hold on new cases coming through due to difficulties finding suitable accommodation.

The meeting heard North Yorkshire Council was awaiting ministerial sign off on taking more refugees, but market towns such as Malton and Richmond were not suitable for the refugees as some had significant medical needs and would be too remote from hospitals.

An officer added: “We constantly find problems in terms of the Home Office not paying us on time. Well, they have never paid us on time, but now it’s getting months and months and months before we get a payment.

“For example, we had some Afghan families arrive January 2022. We only got a first month’s instalment about three months ago. We’ve also got special educational needs and disability cases we can claim exceptional needs expenditure – we’ve been waiting over 12 months for that.

“The Home Office really have not geared up. They’ve not resourced up and of course there’s the other crises, the Afghan crisis, the Ukrainian crisis as well which they are now dealing with.

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"But it does cause issues. If we didn’t have economies of scale there would be serious issues there.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Financial support for North Yorkshire is managed on behalf of the Home Office by Migration Yorkshire, a local authority-led partnership which works across the whole of the region.

"There has been no delay on the part of the Home Office to release these funds and we will be contacting Migration Yorkshire to check that all financial support for the local authority has been delivered.”