Our Current Impact

Over the past two years, we’ve been collecting data to measure and demonstrate the impact of our work, aligned with our theory of change. The data we collect focuses on changes in how clients’ view their situation and their circumstances, as well as the impact of our engagement and influencing work.

We ask clients to give their views on the following statements:

• I am confident that I could deal with unexpected events
• How strongly do you feel like you belong to your immediate neighbourhood? (Please think of the areas a few minutes walking distance from your home)
• Over the past two weeks, how often have you been bothered by worrying too much about different things?

We also ask clients to share their economic status (e.g. in employment or education), whether they are accessing external support and what support that is, and the type of accommodation they are living in at that time.

In March 2025, our impact data showed:

(April to December 2024 - sample size: 436 clients. Data accessed 03/03/25)

Rebuilding your life as a refugee here in Britain is really difficult. If we can see improvements in areas of life like feeling safe and belonging, that can be huge progress for people who are going through troubling times. Our data shows our clients’ circumstances have significant impact on the outcomes they experience.

For Refugee Council, tracking patterns in what our clients are experiencing and feeling will help us learn and improve, and help us advocate for clients.

Our journey and where we are still learning

We’ve been developing these statistics working closely with our expert project workers and clients to define and refine the metrics by which we measure our impact. Since late 2022 we have collected data in three phases, making changes and improvements at each stage.

So although we have made huge progress in measuring our impact, there are still limitations to the data we are collecting.

This includes:

• Our phased approach to data collection means we have less data for some client groups
• We don’t ask all our clients to share their answers to the question above – as it isn’t always appropriate. For example, we don’t collect this information for children under the age of 16 who arrive here without their parents or family members.

Going forward, our priority is to increase the amount of data we are collecting across all services, as appropriate, to support us to understand, demonstrate and continuously improve our impact. We will continue to update the statistics on this page to reflect this.