MORE than 130 families who have offered to host Ukrainians arriving in Dorset have yet to be matched with refugees.

A Dorset Council report says that 62 refugees have had to be ‘rematched’ with host families since arriving.

A report to councillors said: “Arrangements are now being put in place to offer financial support to hosts and to support Ukrainian guests to find alternative accommodation either through rematching or with support to enter the private rented sector.”

The Dorset scheme has seen 739 Ukraine refugees being cared for in the county, 320 of them children.

Almost 300 host households are registered with 46 recently approved and currently awaiting the arrival of 91 ‘guests’.

The report says that seventy per cent of Dorset hosts are happy to continue hosting beyond the initial arrangement of six months.

The people and health scrutiny committee next week will be told that initial problems with the system have now been overcome and the processes are working smoothly with checks on potential hosts being carried out on time.

Dorset schools are said to be working hard to accommodate arriving children with 278 school applications received and 242 children on roll although, of these, 23 have made other arrangements, left the area or gone back to Ukraine with 13 yet to confirm their intentions.

Dorset Council’s resettlement team has also looked after over a hundred Syrian and Afghan refugees and is currently directly supporting 15 families with another family expected in December.

Dorset Council now has 41 unaccompanied refugee children in its care: nine aged 15 and below, and 32 who are 16 or 17 – although more than 80 per cent of them are being cared for out of the county, which has increased the pressure on Dorset social work teams.

Said the report: “This has resulted in an overall increase in the number of children in care, which otherwise would have seen a reduction. It has also become increasingly difficult to secure local placements for these children, with the majority (83%) being placed out of county, resulting in additional travel for social workers and independent reviewing officers and an increased requirement for the virtual school to work with other local authority areas to secure school places, which can be challenging in many areas where school places are full.”

There report also notes that there is currently a shortfall between the funding local government receives for its work with refugees and the actual costs of caring for unaccompanied children.