Homeowner keen to house a Ukrainian refugee couple in Inverness but was beaten by red tape – Highland Council has promised to enter the information manually after system failure
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A Crimean man who wanted to provide a home for two Ukrainian refugees was left frustrated when the online registration system repeatedly failed to record the details of his empty property.
Highland Council, which deals with registration and property inspections as part of the resettlement scheme, has promised to manually enter the information after the Inverness Courier highlighted the issue.
The 46-year-old man, who wished to be known as “Ivan Stark” for fear of Russian reprisals, lived in Inverness from 2012 and worked as an IT engineer at a health firm.
However, he moved to Aberdeenshire two years ago, leaving his property in Inshes empty.
He said: “I moved from the city when Covid started, so I had no proper chance to either sell or rent it because I literally did not have enough time to do that.”
Mr Stark said he wanted to host two refugees – a husband and wife – and first tried to register the property at the end of May.
Despite getting an automated response and a reference number he heard nothing further.
And when he finally managed to speak to a member of the council’s resettlement team he was told they did not have details of his property in the database.
He tried to register it three more times, up to the end of last month, with the same outcome.
During this time he has also tried to speak with the UK government’s department for levelling up and housing and communities as well as the Home Office.
Mr Stark said: “I forwarded them the details of the replies which I had received from the government system because that was all I had. They started asking for more details about the family and personal data. I said this is who they are living with at the moment, but after that I heard nothing.”
He said he had gone through the “seven circles of hell”.
“They have put up a wall where you cannot reach them – but they can reach you,” he said.
“I told them all the information – why can’t they resolve it themselves? Their systems are not working.”
When the Courier contacted the council, a spokeswoman said that, while the authority could not comment on individual applications, she could confirm that expressions of interest were due to be processed manually by the resettlement team.
