With thanks to local authority users in the 91 councils using NRPF Connect, and the Home Office NRPF team, we are delighted to publish our 2024–2025 annual data report.
NRPF Connect provides the only UK-wide data on households with no recourse to public funds who are accessing accommodation and financial support from children’s social care or adult social care, as recorded by the 91 councils in England, Scotland, and Wales that are using the system. The dataset is drawn from NRPF Connect’s case management system, providing a direct view into frontline experience that can inform strategic decision making.
The collective data and findings show that the role of social care teams in alleviating child poverty, destitution, and homelessness is essential, and continuing. What is happening in practice must, however, be clearly defined in statutory guidance and not ignored, unmentioned, or misunderstood.
While restricting access to the benefits system remains a key aspect of UK immigration policy, the government will continue to rely on social care to deliver the necessary support to keep the most vulnerable residents, including children, safe. It is time to fund this council-led response.
The Home Office must also do more to address the long-term challenges councils experience when delivering this essential safety-net to residents with no recourse to public funds.
Key findings
- Supporting households with no recourse to public funds is an essential, yet costly, area of social care practice, with 91 councils in England, Scotland and Wales supporting 5,724 adults with care needs, families, and care leavers at a collective cost of £94m between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025.
- The need for this vital intervention increased with referrals increasing by 13% for adults with care needs and 16% for families compared to the previous year.
- Councils using NRPF Connect to work in partnership with the Home Office have achieved a high rate of case resolution – at the end of March 2025, the number of adults receiving support decreased by 6 and the number of families receiving support increased by 44 compared to the start of the year.
- Although caseloads have not substantially increased, the average time on support remains unacceptably high, at just under 2.5 years for adults with care needs and just under 1.5 years for families, with 30% of adults and 16% of families supported for at least 1,000 days.
- The most common reason for ending support was a grant of leave to remain, which can take years to obtain.
- Through NRPF Connect, the Home Office NRPF team provides councils with a high volume and well-used service, responding quickly and well within agreed timescales when the team is at full staffing capacity, although failed to meet agreed response times when the team was understaffed earlier in the year.
- The true extent of the support provided to adults with care needs is unknown, due to under-reporting amongst adult social care teams in councils currently subscribing to NRPF Connect.
Read the report for a more detailed summary of the findings and full analysis of the data.
What needs to change
As a result of the report’s findings, we recommend that the UK government should:
- Provide councils with grant funding specifically to fund the delivery of support to residents with no recourse to public funds when social care duties are engaged
- Define how social care duties apply to supporting families and adults with no recourse to public funds within existing statutory guidance for social workers
- Implement policies and operational procedures aimed at substantially reducing the number of households supported by councils on long-standing basis and ensure that the Home Office NRPF team remains fully staffed
We also make recommendations to councils to help inform their practice.
Please refer to the annual report for a complete list of recommendations.
Funding for councils
Councils play an important role in supporting the implementation of national immigration policy through delivering resettlement schemes, looking after unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, supporting care leavers, and assisting residents living in Home Office asylum accommodation. Councils receive grant funding from the UK government for providing these vital services. However, the UK government’s funding allocations do not acknowledge the work councils do to alleviate homelessness, destitution, or child poverty by safeguarding the welfare of children and adults with care needs who have no recourse to public funds – often whilst people are waiting for Home Office decisions.
Our call for funding is not new but is more urgent than ever as the need for support rises and the direction of national immigration policy is to increase restrictions on benefits by extending settlement routes and making indefinite leave to remain more difficult to achieve.
Defining duties in statutory guidance
We are, for the first time, recommending that social care duties to provide accommodation and financial support to families and adults with care needs who have no recourse to public funds are clearly defined in statutory guidance. In England there is no recognition in statutory social care guidance that supporting families or adults with care needs who have no recourse to public funds is a responsibility arising from section 17 of the Children Act 1989 and the Care Act 2014.
Our data demonstrates that, for many councils, supporting households with no recourse to public funds has become a core service within children's social care and adult social care. Additionally, frequent legal challenges have resulted in the courts providing clear direction about how the legislation must be applied when people have no recourse to public funds, yet these findings have not been reflected in statutory guidance. Outlining these well-established duties within Working Together to Safeguard Children and the Care and Support Statutory Guidance is the natural culmination of policy and practice formation over the last 20 years.
Although social care duties, as they apply to residents with no recourse to public funds, are clearly set out in our comprehensive practice guidance, which is supported by the Local Government Association, Association of Directors of Children’s Services and Association of Directors of Adults Social Services, without recognition of these duties on a statutory basis, our guidance remains advisory.
There is a similar omission in statutory social care guidance for councils in Scotland and Wales, although the Scottish and Welsh governments have supported the production of separate guidance to strengthen understanding of the legal frameworks that apply to supporting people with no recourse to public funds.
Improved support from the Home Office
The Home Office must learn from the experience of working with councils to implement a resolution for people receiving support on a long-standing basis who are unable or unlikely to leave the UK.
It is also vital that the Home Office continues to fully staff the team that operates NRPF Connect to continue its successful partnership with local government. A short survey of NRPF Connect users in June 2025 found that 83% of responders were either very satisfied or satisfied with the service they receive from the Home Office NRPF team. However, the team failed to respond to councils' enquiries within agreed timeframes when it was not fully staffed. We need to ensure the partnership between local government and the Home Office is sustainable in the longer term, and available to all authorities who wish to participate.
What councils can do
Councils can help address the high costs, rising need, and diversity of people receiving support by getting the basics right, which means having oversight of this area of work, continuing to meet needs, and ensuring that caseloads are recorded on NRPF Connect.
Notes on the data
Data recorded on NRPF Connect demonstrates the costs incurred by councils through delivering support to households with no recourse to public funds when statutory social care duties are engaged to alleviate homelessness and destitution. The data also provides an insight into the people receiving support in terms of their immigration status, duration of support, and make-up of family households.
This year we have changed the way of counting households receiving financial support to provide a more complete picture of caseloads and costs. Any person or family that was provided with financial support at any point between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025 was counted regardless of whether they were still being supported at the end of the year. We previously reported on a snapshot of households that were receiving financial support at the end of the financial year, i.e. on 31 March.
What happens next?
We will be working with councils and local government associations to take forward our recommendations.
Councils using NRPF Connect will be provided with their own annual data and are welcome to contact us to discuss any issues relating to the data or their use of the system. Users can also refer to our new FAQs for support with using the system.
For 2025-26, we will continue to publish UK-wide and regional data on a quarterly basis. We are also working towards the integration of a data dashboard into NRPF Connect to help councils monitor their own caseloads.