The UKBA has many roles in the asylum process, including housing. It looks now like they are seeking to hand over that role to other organisations through their new project entitled COMPASS. This is Commercial and Operational Managers Procuring Asylum Support Services. G4S plc is one of the bidders for this contract. According to their presentation the UKBA have split up the UK into six regions:

London and the South of England
North East Yorkshire and Humberside
North West
West Midlands and East of England
Wales
Scotland and Northern Ireland

Each region can be bidded on by any number of organisations including housing associations, city councils and private companies. According to the presentation the rules are that each organisation can only bid on two regions maximum and a third if there are no further bidders in that region. However G4S's website claims that they have been invited by the UKBA to bid on all six regions, so we will have to wait to see what is true.

The time scale is:

Invitation to tender: June 2011
Tender evaluation: Oct 2011
Contract Awarded: Feb 2012
Operational Permit: Aug 2012

The contracts are separate for each region based on the amount of people that need housing and support. The whole contract package includes housing, support services and transport.We don't know about other cities but in Wales the rival bidders included a housing association, the city council and the security company Reliance.

We feel that G4S and other private security and logistics companies are not fit to run housing and support services. All options are pretty dire, but we would prefer to see city councils or housing associations running housing instead of global security giants.

we hope this informations is useful, we will update if and when we find more information.