2nd opinion: Cohesion wouldn't go amiss

This week we asked people on our refugee housing training course in the East Midlands about the worst housing difficulties faced by their communities. Typical answers included "unhealthy, damp housing", "no infrastructure that helps refugees integrate" and "areas where refugees fall in harm's way".

Later this month we will be bringing refugees face-to-face with local councils, voluntary and community organisations and housing providers to explore how to tackle these issues in the context of the East Midlands' regional housing strategy. But, reading the comments in preparation for this event, I wonder how far the fine aspirations are backed up by systems with antennae sensitive enough to respond effectively to fast-changing circumstances.

For starters, national and municipal policies often clash and end up working against each other.

Take the national policy of asylum seeker dispersal. A number of local authorities in the East Midland region – Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton and Nottingham – have engaged with the Home Office's National Asylum Support Service and a few housing associations are involved. But evidence at an ODPM special committee in May suggested that NASS has placed a disproportionate number of asylum seekers into disadvantaged communities.

Is the regional housing strategy in touch with the significant tensions this can create? There are three themes underpinning the East Midlands regional housing strategy: balance, inclusion and coordination. But the current growth of new migrant groups in the region – which is partly a result of dispersal – can have an impact on the region's ability to adequately address these themes.

New migrant groups are more likely to be homeless or living in poor housing. Ironically, the big housing problem comes once asylum seekers get a positive decision and have to move out of their NASS accommodation at very short notice – usually in areas needing renewal.

They can bring skills and assets that contribute to economic growth, and may be in short supply in the region – for example in the construction industry.

Indeed, parts of the region have a track record of migrant groups making a positive contribution. But other localities in which asylum seekers are accommodated have no recent history of migrant settlement, are largely monocultural areas and they desperately need positive local leadership to welcome and encourage settlement.

The government's integration strategy states that housing and community development are fundamental concerns.

Yet coordination and resourcing of a socially cohesive integration policy remains inadequate. Even guidance to regions on facilitating estimates of the longer-term housing needs and aspirations of newly emerging communities is non-existent.

The East Midlands housing strategy merely provides a static baseline figure of 4477 asylum seekers supported in the region by NASS on 1 January 2004.

Making the links at policy and provider levels – particularly with refugees and other groups in the neighbourhoods in which they are placed and choose to settle – is the only way to ensure that the regional housing strategy not only delivers positive outcomes in the short term, but also stays up to date and relevant in the future.