To follow on from what Jen Ang said, we really support the Lift the Ban campaign, partly because what people want more than anything else is to work. When I speak to people who are seeking refugee protection, they want to be given that key socioeconomic right to contribute and chart their own course in their new community in Glasgow, or wherever they are in the UK.
The point that I was making stems from the deeper, effective tactic that the UK Government, through the Home Office, persistently pushes, which is to shunt responsibility and costs on to devolved Governments and local authorities across the UK, as well as on to third sector and charities. That happens with the NRPF system, in social security policy, and it absolutely happens in asylum dispersal policy. In the latter case, asylum seekers are moved on a no-choice basis to private accommodation in the cheapest parts and housing markets in the UK, in the areas with the deepest, most entrenched forms of multiple deprivation, and the Home Office provides no direct funding to local authorities or the third sector.
To be frank, the Home Office is scamming the rest of the UK on dispersal, and it is the same with the NRPF system. It is deeply insulting that, when people who have contributed need that support, they are told, “You’re not getting it.” That is why we made those points in our written submission. Those individuals are being treated in an egregious manner, and it is the Home Office that is scamming them.
People come and contribute—they work and pay taxes. How dare the Home Office come along through their system of no recourse to public funds and say, “We’re not here now. We’ve benefited from all the work and effort that you’ve put in, but we’re not going to be here now”!
Who, then, must pay? It is the individual and their families, who could be made destitute and at risk of exploitation. Local authorities and the third sector have to step in to try to help, if they are there—they might not be. The Home Office, the officials and politicians who run the system for, to be frank, ideological reasons, then detach. I am yet to meet a Home Office official who can show me the written evidence that the NRPF system works and that people are coming here in order to get social security benefits. They are not doing that; people are coming to contribute. There is no evidence for that, which is why I describe the NRPF system, not loosely but factually, as an ideological mechanism.
Basically, the NRPF system shunts the costs and the responsibility on to those who are least able to deal with it: the individual; local authorities, often in deprived areas; charities; and communities. As I keep saying, the NRPF system is a structural thing. Particularly in the Covid recovery phase, it needs to be dismantled, because it drags down people with its pretty dreadful tentacles and keeps them there—they cannot get free of it. Obviously, the strategy will be important, because that is to try to pull people out of it and to ensure that they are safe in accommodation, with good access to services, including health, legal advice and accommodation, so that, it is hoped, they can move on with their lives and make choices about their futures and, ideally, regularise their status.
You described an issue affecting a family member. I have dealt with cases of individuals who have conditions placed on them. There are two groups in the NRPF population. One group is the very vulnerable, and the people in it are undocumented and classed as irregular migrants. The other group of people have leave to remain but conditions are placed on that, as in the case of the family member who you referred to. There is a legal process to go through with the Home Office to try to get those conditions lifted. I have been involved in cases where that has happened. Other witnesses at this meeting do that far more often than SRC or I do.
All that is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is that those conditions are placed on people for no good reason at all. To add insult to injury, the recession that we are in, which has been caused by Covid and by EU withdrawal, is hitting sectors where we find significant numbers of migrant workers, such as hospitality—Eloise Nutbrown mentioned that earlier—and agriculture. People are losing their jobs. If they cannot fall back on a social security system or a homelessness system, they are destitute.
Home Office officials and politicians sit there, presiding over that system. We must be smart and campaign coherently against the root cause of the problem. In the meantime, we must be practical in ameliorating the effects of what the system does to people, local authorities, services and charities.