Nationality and Borders Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Bambos Charalambous and Siobhain McDonagh

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Chair]

We will now hear oral evidence from Councillor Roger Gough, from Kent County Council, who is joining us virtually, and Councillor Rachael Robathan, from Westminster City Council, who is here in person. We have until 4pm. Would the witnesses introduce themselves for the record?

Councillor Roger Gough: I am Roger Gough. I am the leader of Kent County Council. I also chair the South-East Strategic Partnership for Migration.

Councillor Rachael Robathan: I am Rachael Robathan, I am leader of Westminster City Council.

[Bambos Charalambous]

Q I thank both witnesses for coming today to give evidence. I just wonder about your experience of the pressures of having to look after asylum seekers in your respective authorities. I know that it will be different for each of you but what pressures have your councils been under?

Councillor Rachael Robathan: Just to give a current picture; we have 638 Afghan refugees who have come in as part of the current settlement in one hotel on the Edgware Road. We have a further 589 refugees who were in Westminster prior to that, spread across five hotels. Our experience is that clearly there is a lot of pressure on local services in terms of identifying health, educational and other support needs. There is not always the advance warning that local authorities would wish to have in terms of knowing about the placements before they arrive. Clearly, as much notice as we can be given from the Home Office, Clearsprings or whoever is placing the asylum seekers is very much to our advantage so that we can prepare and know what we are dealing with.

The other thing to stress is that there are particularly significant issues that arise. For example, over a third of the current Afghan refugees placed in Westminster are children and of those 10% are not with their parents or guardians, and have not travelled with them, so there is an immediate safeguarding issue, which the local authority needs to step in and deal with. While there is funding for the people placed in the hotels, there are undoubtedly significant pressures and concerns about how we support other people. It is unclear how long those refugees will be staying in those hotels. We are working on three months, but it could be longer than that, or it could be less. Those are the main things.

The current Afghan refugee settlement has been more co-ordinated than previous asylum-seeker placements, because there has been more of a joined-up approach. Westminster has a lot of tourist hotels in the centre of our city, which currently are not as full as hopefully they otherwise would be, so in areas where there is an availability of hotels there tends to be a disproportionate placement of asylum seekers, without necessarily the recognition of the pressure that that puts on the surrounding area.

Councillor Roger Gough: As you indicated in your question, clearly we have a very specific set of circumstances in Kent which relate to the Channel crossings and in particular to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Taking asylum overall first, most of the adult and accompanied child asylum seekers who arrive in Kent do not spend very long in Kent. There has been an exception to that for the last year, which is the use of the Napier Barracks near Folkestone, which has been a source of some challenge and controversy throughout its period of use. Most adult asylum seekers are rapidly moved on and dispersed. For us, the big issue has been unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. As you may know, we have twice in the last year had to suspend full operation of our statutory duties. Between August and, I think, early December last year and again between June and earlier this month, we did not collect young people from the port because our services at that point were put under extreme pressure.

To give an idea of what that means, there was great pressure on accommodation capacity since, this year in particular, we started to see more younger young people––under-16s––than we had in previous years. That certainly put pressure on fostering placements. For the slightly older young people, there was also pressure on some of the accommodation that they were placed in. That meant that young people were being placed outside the county, which clearly has significant impact in terms of oversight, safeguarding and so on. You must then add to that the fact that case loads and the pressure on our social work teams were reaching levels that we viewed as unsafe. Those are the sort of pressures that we were seeing in that area, and we have been working with the Home Office to try to make that a more manageable situation.

Turning to some of the wider areas, adult asylum dispersal, with the significant exception of Napier Barracks, has not been a factor for us very much in recent years. In terms of resettlement schemes, Kent, along with other parts of the south-east, played a full role in the Syrian scheme and is now looking to do so to the greatest possible extent with the Afghan scheme. We have three hotels in Kent that are being applied to Afghan families who are arriving.