Refugee Integration

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is absolutely right that we have the aspiration of fully integrating all those granted refugee status into UK life. I appreciate the application of thinking of the noble Lord, Lord German, about how we can do that, how they can provide for themselves and settle in, and so on. But, however short this debate is, we cannot ignore a broader political context and the contemporary problem of cultural integration.

Whether we like it or not, the status of refugees has become tarnished in the eyes of the public, discredited by the loss of faith in the process of determining who is legitimately here and the loss of control of our borders. The catastrophic backlog in assessing asylum claims means that there are worries that some are arriving in small boats, being waved through and so on. That causes resentments, which is not a good plan for integrating people. We have to be honest: integrating new refugees when the public are sympathetic to them escaping horrendous wars and brutal regimes is one thing, but it is different if they have a suspicion of status. There is a difference between integrating new refugees into a dynamic and self-confident country with a generous invitation to become part of British society and today’s reality, which is a combination of a polarised society, economic stagnation and all sorts of toxic things going on. We have failing public services, councils on the brink of bankruptcy and a housing crisis affecting all British citizens, so we cannot expect this to be all smooth sailing.

We need to take a step back. I refer noble Lords to recent events in Ireland over the last week or so. On Tuesday, Mayo County Council unanimously, in a cross-party resolution, passed a motion calling on all council staff to cease co-operation with the department of integration—aptly named for this debate. The issue is about housing asylum seekers and agreed refugees in the county. Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil councillors declared that non-co-operation would continue until

“an agreed strategy is put in place to properly co-ordinate the provision of additional services for the communities hosting refugees”.

This comes after violent clashes between the gardaí—the Irish police—and protesters outside a hotel in Roscrea in County Tipperary on Monday night, again in relation to housing asylum seekers and refugees.

It was interesting that Mayo councillors emphasised that, as much as anything else, they were acting to ensure that refugees would not be blamed for the scramble for scarce jobs, services and housing. They do not want scapegoating. As one councillor noted, the Irish state could be seen as discriminating against those already living in County Mayo, including migrants and earlier refugees who have been based there for years, sometimes decades. Such sentiments are reflected here in the UK.

Many people from a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds feel uneasy about how best to integrate refugees here and about whether there is enough to go around. Perhaps even more challenging is the issue of cultural integration. Historically, refugees from all sorts of ethnic and religious backgrounds interacted and forged common bonds in British society. However, we have a problem with what the newly ennobled noble Lord, Lord Cameron, when Prime Minister, once called the doctrine of “state multiculturalism”, which splinters society into different cultural blocks, often competing identity groups, living parallel lives. This official policy has undermined national identity and fuelled disunity, all in the name of diversity. I fear that it will be the greatest threat that we have to properly integrating any new refugees.