Together with MDF partners Equal Education Chances (EEC), Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST), Growing Together Levenshulme (GTL) and Support and Action Women’s Network (SAWN), we’ve submitted a response to the government’s consultation ‘Family Returns: Reforming Asylum Support and Enforcing Returns’.
The government is proposing removing asylum support from children whose parents have been refused asylum. They also want to make it even harder for families to access local authority support. And they want to use force against children to make it easier to remove families from the UK.
As organisations working directly with people living at the hard edge of the Hostile Environment, we know the hardships families with children are already going through, whether on the poverty of asylum support, or facing enforced destitution. So, in our response, we’ve drawn on our collective expertise to tell the Home Office:
- How the legal aid crisis, the complexity of the system and Home Office error routinely lead to people being wrongly refused asylum
- How these proposals will dramatically increase numbers of families in our communities forced into destitution
...the struggle of getting by while destitute makes it very difficult to engage in the challenging process of gathering evidence and finding a lawyer for further submissions. These barriers to making further submissions would be even more significant for families who would have the additional challenges of bringing up their children while destitute.
- How forcing families into destitution will not ‘incentivise’ them to leave the UK – it will just cause harm to parents and children, damaging physical and mental health, causing social isolation, exposing families to risk of exploitation, as well as undermining social cohesion.
Those with a valid asylum claim to make, but who have been unable to prove their case, remain in the UK not out of choice, but out of necessity: it is unsafe for them to return.
- How the proposals will make it even harder for local authorities to fulfil their duty under section 17 of the Children Act 1989 to "safeguard and promote the welfare of children within their area who are in need" - as well as breaching the UK's obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
- How the threat of use of force will exacerbate already high levels of fear in migrant communities, risking families disengaging from services and going underground.
Children have no say in the decisions made by their parents. The harms these proposals will bring will therefore punish children for reasons far beyond their control.
These are not accidental harms, but are designed into the proposals, weaponising children’s wellbeing for the purposes of immigration control.
Any politician or civil servant who signs off on these proposals can't say they haven't been warned.
They know what they are doing.
Read our full response here.
In accordance with the UK’s international obligations and as quite rightly enshrined in domestic law, children must be treated as children first and foremost. They must not be punished for circumstances beyond their control. They must not be turned into weapons of immigration control in order to pressurise their parents.
If implemented, these proposals will cause significant and predictable harms to children in our communities, with a deeply negative impact on wider social cohesion. They run directly counter to government priorities to reduce homelessness, tackle child poverty, and improve social cohesion.
Our organisations are privileged to work with parents and children who, amidst intense hardships whether living on asylum support or facing destitution, are finding ways to thrive. Our communities are richer for their commitment – despite policies which isolate and segregate – to grow, integrate and contribute to our society. We need to see policies which facilitate such commitment, not obstruct it further.