Councils have pledged to stand ready to offer help as ministers announce fresh measures to help Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion.
Chair of the Local Government Association's (LGA) asylum, refugee and migration task force, Nick Forbes, warned a webinar that ‘more substantial pressures' were ‘likely to come over the next couple of years'.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week promised to be ‘very generous' over Ukrainian refugees coming to Britain to allow people to enter when they were in fear of persecution or to reunite with family.
He has announced that the UK will double the number of Ukrainians eligible to come to Britain to 200,000.
Former Local Government Association chairman Gary Porter tweeted the local government sector agreed the UK ‘must urgently offer sanctuary to its fair share of Ukrainian refugees'.
The UK already has 12,000 Afghan refugees still awaiting resettlement, with homes offered to families that have fled Taliban-controlled Afghanistan reportedly having lain empty for months.
Housing minister Eddie Hughes claimed this was because refugees had rejected offers of accommodation - in some cases due to misconceptions about their location.
He added: ‘We need to do a good job of selling the fact the UK is more than London.'
The capital is still hosting around a third of the Afghan evacuee hotel population, with London Councils describing hotels as ‘wholly inappropriate' for housing asylum-seeker families.
The minister for Afghan resettlement, Victoria Atkins, told the LGA webinar the system had been created ‘at speed' but was now ‘at a more effective place'.
She conceded: ‘There have been, in the last six months, bumps in the road.'
Ms Atkins added she had met refugees qualified as judges, doctors and dentists and ‘there's a real opportunity for your community here'.
Director for resettlement at the Home Office, Sean Palmer, said the Afghan resettlement programme was a ‘more limited and controlled cohort' than the wider asylum system, adding: ‘Those issues are even more difficult.
'The asylum system is an even harder nut to crack.'
