By Priya Sahni-Nicholas, Co-Executive Director of the Equality Trust and Secretariat of the APPG on Poverty and Inequality, and Laura Taylor, Executive Director at The Refugee, Asylum and Migration Policy (RAMP) Project and Secretariat of the APPG on Migration
The new government should take this opportunity to fix the UK’s broken immigration system and help eradicate extreme poverty and destitution.
Back in April we published our joint report on the effects of the UK immigration system on poverty. The report was the culmination of our work over a six-month period where we decided to bring together the often separate policy discussions of poverty and migration in the UK. Our aim was to analyse how immigration policy exacerbates poverty for those subject to immigration controls, leading to barriers that impact their long-term integration and wellbeing.
We put out a call for evidence at the first stage of the inquiry, asking for submissions from those with lived experience of the migration system and those with professional experience from those working in the migration and poverty sectors. We received nearly 200 submissions in total, 76 from people with lived experience and 120 submissions from organisations working in poverty and migration. After reviewing the evidence submitted, we held oral evidence sessions in parliament inviting organisations who responded to our call for evidence such as Praxis, Shelter, IPPR and Child Poverty Action Group to speak to their submissions in more detail to our APPG chairs and officers. We are also very grateful to Citizens UK and Women for Refugee Women who helped us convene two groups with lived experience to give oral evidence of their experiences. We also commissioned a lived experience roundtable discussion, facilitated by NACCOM (The No Accommodation Network) and Oxford’s COMPAS (Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society) to supplement the parliamentary evidence sessions.
We heard compelling testimony from the lived experience participants about the severe impacts of poverty on their physical and mental health, self-esteem, and ability to integrate into UK communities. While these challenges are common to many in poverty, migrants face unique obstacles, such as isolation from family and friends, lack of support networks, and restrictions that limit their ability to improve their circumstances. For some, particularly those seeking refuge, poverty in the UK compounded trauma from experiences in their home countries or during their journeys. Parliamentarians found it hard to avoid the conclusion that policy is sometimes designed to push people into poverty in the hope that it will deter others from moving to the UK, even though there is little evidence that this would indeed be a deterrent.
Many of the participants identified not having the right to work whilst waiting for a decision on their asylum application as the main reason they experienced poverty.
There was an overwhelming desire from the participants to be able to work and contribute to society, to stand on their own two feet and where possible, to reduce their reliance on the state.
One of our key recommendations is to give those seeking asylum in the UK the right to work after 6 months, allowing them the chance to support themselves and escape poverty and destitution. Other recommendations from our report include:
- Shorten immigration routes to settlement, specifically reducing the current ten-year path to five years, and addressing application backlogs to reduce the prolonged financial burden on migrant families
- Lower immigration and nationality fees, particularly the health surcharge, for lower-income households already residing in the UK, with priority given to reducing fees to cost price for children and young people on the path to British citizenship
- Limit the “No Recourse to Public Funds” (NRPF) condition to a maximum of five years for those on settlement routes, and allow families with children access to Child Benefit and other essential welfare support during this period
- Ensure that services for children, including early years education and post-16 further education, are accessible to all, regardless of immigration status
- Extend the “move-on” period for newly recognised refugees from 28 to 56 days, allowing them more time to secure housing and avoid homelessness
- Develop a comprehensive refugee integration strategy in partnership with regional, local, and devolved governments to support migrants’ full participation in UK communities
- Establish a Migrants’ Commissioner, as per the Windrush Lessons Learned Review, to ensure migrants’ voices are represented in policymaking and improve cross-departmental coordination to mitigate poverty.
In the coming weeks parliamentarians will be writing to Ministers from the Home Office and the Department of Work and Pensions and asking to meet with them to discuss the report and its recommendations. We believe that the new government has a real opportunity to turn the page on a system that is fundamentally broken and that every single department should be responsible for helping to reduce poverty in the UK – including the Home Office. By implementing our recommendations the UK can support migrant integration, reduce poverty, and ultimately strengthen communities and the economy as a whole.
You can read our full report here. We also produced a one page summary of the report which you can find here.
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This article is featured in our 11 December newsletter.
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