February 3, 2025

Navigating the Labyrinth: The impact and experience of poverty in the UK asylum system

By Dr Hannah Haycox, Network Development Coordinator (Liverpool City Region) at Resolve Poverty

At Resolve Poverty, our primary focus is to foster strategic, policy-focused and practical initiatives that improve the financial position of low-income households. However, for many individuals and families exposed to the UK asylum system, immigration and asylum legislation is a root cause of such experiences of poverty.

Join our Resolve Poverty conference breakout session, ‘Navigating the Labyrinth: The impact and experience of poverty in the UK asylum system’, to access leading, multi-sector guidance on how to develop powerful responses to poverty in collaboration with those seeking asylum, researchers, and specialist VCFSE representatives.

It is well-established that poverty constitutes a central feature of the UK asylum system. The institutional denial of the right to work, the prohibited access to social security via the ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ visa condition, and the current rate of asylum support income (£49.18 per household member) intersect in people’s lived experiences, leading to entrenched poverty. People seeking asylum thus struggle with access to basic subsistence, including food, clothing, and toiletries, as a direct result of being forced to rely on low-level asylum support.

Our Annual Conference delves further into intersections between poverty and UK asylum policy, with an in-depth exploration of these themes during one of our breakout sessions. Drawing on our panel of experts, we will consider two key questions:

  1. What strategic, policy and practical initiatives can we collectively identify as ‘best practice’ in responding to the poverty experienced by people seeking asylum?
  2. How can we work collaboratively to further amplify the expertise and advocacy of people seeking asylum in the UK?

The session will firstly situate current immigration and asylum policy in its broader historical origins. We will trace how the stigma associated with experiences of poverty has long been tied to the disentitlement of people fleeing persecution, including in one of the UK’s first pieces of immigration legislation (The Aliens Act (1905).* The breakout session will then generate discussions of practical, localised interventions in response to poverty in the asylum system, by drawing on shared knowledge from specialist stakeholders and lived experience experts.

Members of our expert panel of speakers include:

Dr Hannah Haycox will chair the session, facilitating interactive discussions with attendees and panel members, and allocating time to reflect on current and future asylum policy and practice.

The Resolve Poverty Annual Conference will be held on Thursday 13 March 2025 at Manchester Hall. Click here to book a place and find out more information about the day, including our speaker line-up, details on all our breakout sessions and FAQs.

If you have any further questions in relation to the breakout session, please contact hannah@resolvepoverty.org.

*The following quote from the Aliens Act (1905) can further shed light on how the stigma associated with poverty has been continually tied to measures to disentitle people fleeing persecution: “An immigrant shall be considered an undesirable immigrant if he cannot show that he has in his possession, or is in a position to obtain, the means of decently supporting himself and his dependents, if any” (1905, Aliens Act).

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This article is featured in our 5 February newsletter.

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