Befriending refugees and new arrivals
Community sponsorship is the Home Office route by which a group of local people, working through an approved lead sponsor, takes responsibility for resettling one refugee family in their area: securing the housing, meeting the family on arrival, and supporting them through their first period in the UK.
A group of neighbours considering community sponsorship, a volunteer offered an integration befriending match, and the coordinator who has to keep both inside the law.
The family’s independence, and the volunteer’s legal position. Immigration advice is regulated in the UK, and a kind answer to a question about a Home Office letter can be a criminal offence.
The group does everything: the forms, the calls, the appointments, the translating. Eighteen months later the family can navigate nothing alone, and everyone involved believes the arrangement went well.
It is the most demanding form of befriending anyone volunteers for, because the group is not visiting a person’s life for an hour a week, it is standing behind the whole of it. Integration befriending, the lighter and far more common arrangement, is a normal one to one match.
How a group gets approved for community sponsorship
To get approved, a group works through an approved lead sponsor, a registered charity or community interest company that holds the formal relationship with the Home Office, and satisfies a fixed set of requirements before any family is named. The sequence is the same whether the group is in Glasgow, London or a village of four hundred people:
- Form a group large enough to sustain a rota for at least a year, not merely to fill one meeting.
- Partner with an approved lead sponsor, or become one, which is a substantial undertaking in itself.
- Secure suitable accommodation at an affordable rent, for the period the Home Office requires, which is longer than the support commitment.
- Raise and evidence the minimum funds the Home Office specifies, held and accounted for properly.
- Write a resettlement plan covering arrival, housing, benefits registration, healthcare, schooling, English language learning and the route to work.
- Obtain the consent of the local authority, which has its own duties towards the family.
- Complete safeguarding arrangements, including criminal record checks for volunteers in eligible roles: DBS in England and Wales, PVG scheme membership in Scotland, AccessNI in Northern Ireland.
- Submit through the lead sponsor and wait, because the family is matched to the group rather than chosen by it.
Scheme rules, fund thresholds and even the scheme’s name change. This site does not publish grant figures, fund ceilings or deadlines for community sponsorship, and no year stamped summary of the requirements, including this page, replaces the Home Office’s current published guidance. Check it in the year you apply.
Integration befriending, and why most volunteers do that instead
Integration befriending matches one volunteer with one newly arrived person or family for regular contact, usually weekly, usually for 6 to 12 months, without the housing, money or legal responsibilities community sponsorship carries. It is the right entry point for almost everybody. A match might be a weekly visit, a conversation club pairing, or a telephone match where transport or childcare makes meeting difficult. Referrals come from resettlement teams, local authorities, refugee support organisations and schools.
The purpose is ordinary company in a new place, and volunteers routinely mistake it for a project. Someone who has arrived here has usually lost their occupation, their standing, their language and every casual relationship they had. What a befriender restores is the last of those: a person who is pleased to see them and wants nothing.
The practical help that is not the point
Practical help is how the relationship starts and should not be what it becomes. In the first weeks a volunteer legitimately helps with the shape of an unfamiliar system: how a bus timetable works, where the GP surgery is, what a school letter is asking for, which paperwork is a bill and which is advertising. Every one of those is useful and every one is finite.
The failure mode is the volunteer who keeps doing all of it. Doing a task for someone teaches nothing about doing it next time, and a family that cannot make its own appointments after a year is a worse outcome than one that struggled through three in month two. The test is simple: ask whether you are doing the task, doing it alongside, or watching it be done. A match that never moves along that sequence has produced dependence and called it support.
The family wants less contact, or wants to move away
The volunteers accept it without argument and tell the coordinator or lead sponsor, who checks the family has a route to say this to somebody outside the group. The power gap is extreme: a family whose housing, income and social contact all come through the same people cannot easily complain about them. Building an independent contact into the arrangement at the start, and telling the family about it in their own language, is the only thing that makes the option real.
The language gap, and how to work across it
The language gap shapes every other part of the match, and four rules hold. Use a professional interpreter for anything consequential, meaning health, housing, benefits, school placement, safeguarding or legal matters, and treat that cost as part of the budget rather than an extra. Never use a child as an interpreter, at any age, for anything, because it puts a child inside adult information and inverts the family. Never use another family member for anything involving safeguarding or money. And keep everyday conversation in the person’s target language, slowly, because a befriending hour is often the only unpressured English practice in the week, which is exactly what a formal class cannot provide.
Speak in short sentences, avoid idiom, write things down, and confirm understanding by asking the person to explain the plan back rather than asking whether they understood.
The hard boundary: immigration advice is regulated
Giving immigration advice in the UK is regulated, and a volunteer must never give it. Under Part 5 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 it is an offence to provide immigration advice or services in the course of a business, whether or not carried on for profit, unless you are qualified to do so. That wording is the reason a scheme’s volunteer is caught and a private friend chatting in a kitchen is not: a befriending scheme is an organisation providing a service, so its volunteers are acting in the course of a business even though nobody is paid and nobody profits.
The qualified categories are wider than a solicitor or barrister. They cover a registered adviser with the statutory regulator, established as the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner and now operating as the Immigration Advice Authority; a person who is a member of, or authorised by, a designated professional body, which across the four nations means the Law Society and the General Council of the Bar in England and Wales, CILEX, the Law Society of Scotland, the Faculty of Advocates, the Law Society of Northern Ireland and the Bar of Northern Ireland; and a person working within an exempt organisation. The rule protects people from confident wrong answers in a system where a wrong answer can end a claim.
| A volunteer may | A volunteer must never |
|---|---|
| Say that regulated immigration advice exists and is free through some services | Say what someone should apply for, or when |
| Give the contact details of a regulated adviser or a law centre | Explain what a Home Office letter means, or what it will lead to |
| Offer a lift to an appointment with an adviser | Fill in, help complete, or check an immigration form |
| Sit with someone while they wait, if asked | Predict the outcome of a case, however obvious it looks |
| Tell the coordinator the person needs advice urgently | Repeat what worked for a different family |
The honest sentence for a volunteer to have ready is: “I do not know, and I am not allowed to guess, so let us find the person who does.” It is more useful than any answer a volunteer could construct, and it is the only one that does not risk the person’s case.
The volunteer or sponsor group
- Refers every immigration question to a regulated adviser, without a preliminary opinion
- Books a professional interpreter for anything consequential, and never uses a child
- Moves from doing, to doing alongside, to standing back, on a timetable rather than by instinct
- Reports a safeguarding concern to the coordinator or lead sponsor the same day
The person or family supported
- Decides what help they want, and can decline any part without consequence for housing or support
- Has a named contact outside the group, told to them in their own language
- Is told what is recorded about them, who reads it, and how long it is kept
- Is told plainly that the volunteers cannot advise on immigration status, and why that protects them
The scheme carries the checks, the training, the interpreting budget, the insurance and the escalation route, and holds the relationship with the local authority and the Home Office. It decides and writes down how long it keeps records, because UK GDPR sets no fixed retention period, and it plans the ending from the start, since the point of the arrangement is a family that no longer needs it.