Our history

We were originally formed in 1999 as a consortium of councils as a response to the Kosovan Evacuation Programme, where we welcomed the first flight of Kosovans into the UK. Councils continued to work together through this voluntary consortium as the asylum dispersal system was introduced, with an operational role to accommodate and support asylum seekers across ten local authority areas. At this time we were called the Yorkshire and Humberside Consortium for Asylum Seekers.

Our role rapidly also became strategic and covered wider aspects of migration, leading to a change in name to the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Migration Partnership. During this phase we developed work on refugee integration, and migrants from the EU enlargement in 2004. This work included for example refugee integration strategies, the Refugee Integration and Employment Service (RIES), and the Migration Impacts Fund (MIF).

As a result of recession and national political decisions, a number of key programmes ended including delivering asylum accommodation and support, RIES and MIF. During this phase we rebranded to Migration Yorkshire, strengthened our governance and planned ahead for our future role. We broadened our work including a new focus on migrant Roma communities, running national networks and managing projects with multiple partner organisations across the EU, and integration programmes covering all migrants.

We developed a regional approach with the Syrian resettlement and Afghan programmes, introducing for the first time across the UK the ‘fair-share’ model of allocation, and the involvement of all councils supporting refugees in a region. The first people arriving in the UK under both the Syrian and Afghan programmes were settled into Yorkshire and Humber.

We managed a number of large strategic and operational programmes in recent years including Connecting Opportunities, the Refugee Integration Service and Refugee Integration Yorkshire and Humber. We have developed our work on policy, research and data with multiple resources regularly updated at regional and local level.

We have increasingly taken on further responsibilities and workstreams on migration and continue to evolve to rapidly respond to migration priorities, including for example Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking Children and arrivals from Hong Kong and Ukraine.

Find out about migration to Yorkshire and Humber in the 21st Century. 

This presentation will take you on a journey through all of the events that impacted migration from 1999 to 2020, and how Yorkshire and Humber responded to this.

To start the presentation, click on the present button below.  You can open the presentation in full screen by clicking on the icon with two arrows in the right hand corner of the image.