Azure Card

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the thoughtful speech of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. What he said about the contribution of immigrants to this country reminded me of an experience last night. I spoke to Alison Baum, who is the chief executive of Best Beginnings, at the launch of her new baby app. This is an app that pregnant mothers and mothers who have just had infants can use and gives videos of how best, for instance, to breast-feed a baby. I was introduced to her father, Professor Baum, and I heard her husband playing in a band, another Professor Baum, and she told me about her brother, another Professor Baum. I met her son who is very enthusiastic about his education and looks likely to be a further professor Baum—or perhaps not quite of that name. Her father told me about the origins of his family. When I asked him where they started to become professors, he said, “Well, we came out of middle Europe in the 1930s with no education, but in our culture we have an appetite to learn”, and that is what they did. I hope that supports what the noble Lord was saying.

I have long felt concerned about the need to moderate and manage the flow of migration in considering the pressures that exist, as migration is often in those areas where the poorest people live, where the housing is short and where there are difficulties in employment. It is a very difficult and complex issue and needs a very complex and sophisticated response.

Let me also say how grateful I am to the coalition Government for getting families out of detention once they have failed asylum. I think that is an important step forward. I have welcomed it before, but this is an appropriate time to note that as well.

I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, for raising this important debate. He does an extremely important job in continuing to raise in our minds the needs of this particularly vulnerable group of people in our country. I was also grateful for the briefing that he arranged from the Red Cross last night. I am really grateful to him for what he is doing in this area.

There is a very helpful note from the Library, from which it is worth just highlighting what the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee recommended in regard to Section 4 in October 2013. It said:

“Section 4 is not the solution”,

and it went on to say that there should be “a better way forward” for refused asylum seekers.

The Library note also highlights the points that the noble Lord has made about the numbers. The Azure card is supposed to be a short-term answer to the problem, yet the table in the note shows that more than 1,400 of these people using an Azure card have been using it for over two years and 127 have been using it for more than six years. It was very disturbing last night to see a video of a family—I think they had two daughters—who had been on it for maybe four or five years. They then won their appeal, and they were off it and back in the country again. I have many concerns about the Azure card and I support the noble Lord’s request that it should be rethought and abolished, but if that is not possible I hope that the Government will choose to moderate its usage.

I would also like to highlight briefly that, although these individuals and families may have been refused asylum, that does not mean that they do not come from a nation where some kind of Hitler has been running the country for some time; it just means that he may have been removed or have moderated his activity. Often they have had horrific experiences in the place that they have come from. Coming to this country is very difficult. Going through the asylum process itself is traumatic—repeatedly hoping for the best but often having one’s hopes dashed. They often come from dysfunctional countries. For example, I remember visiting Angola previously, to which it is probably safe to return but where people live in fear of the police. I do not want to cast aspersions on any particular country—there are many dysfunctional countries out there—but one can have a great deal of sympathy for people even if they do not fit the criteria necessary to meet an asylum claim.

I am particularly concerned about the isolation of families, to which the Azure card may contribute. A recent report sponsored by the Maternity Mental Health Alliance, produced by the London School of Economics and entitled, The Costs of Perinatal Mental Health Problems, highlighted that the annual cost to this country of not adequately treating perinatal anxiety, depression and psychosis was £8.1 billion. The cost per individual birth is £10,000—a huge cost. Most of it, the report highlights, is constituted in the way that maternal depression, anxiety and so on impact on the relationship with the infant and result in the child’s failure to thrive because of a poor bond in its earliest years with the mother. The report highlights the fact that we should think carefully about the impact of what we are doing to the families under the Section 4 arrangement.

Looking at the figures, I roughly calculate that mothers-to-be will have approximately an additional £2 per week through their pregnancy to meet their needs. I welcome the fact that, a few years ago, the Government decided that pregnant mothers needed additional support and made more available—there is an additional £250 one-off and, sorry, an additional £3 a week. However, I ask the Minister to talk to experts in the field to find out whether that is enough to meet the nutritional requirements, to buy cots, and so on. I do not know what the rationale was for the changes and I would like to know that.

I come back to the issue of isolation. Over the years, from speaking with mothers when visiting Sure Start centres, it has been impressed on me how important it is for parents’ mental health to feel that they are part of a community and are not isolated. For example, a father who had mental health issues told me that being part of a group in a Sure Start centre, meeting other parents over coffee, was important to his recovery. When I spoke to mothers in temporary accommodation—thanks to the work of Barnardo’s and its Families in Temporary Accommodation project—they were able to meet on a weekly basis but they highlighted issues of isolation. In London, there is such a shortage of housing that they may be placed in temporary accommodation a long way from their family, friends and ethnic group. Some of them had to take a number of buses to reach those friends and family. When I accompanied a health visitor on a visit to an African woman with her new-born boy who were living in a house in multiple occupation in Waltham Forest, the health visitor had just a few minutes to make an impact on this woman, who was in tears about her situation when we were there—her partner was back in Africa somewhere, she knew nobody and the only support that she received was from the local church. In that short time, the health visitor had to try to give her the right advice, listen to her concerns and encourage her to go to the local Sure Start centre to begin to make some connections there.

All these experiences, along with conversations with experts working with such mothers, highlight to me that isolation has a terrible, negative impact on perinatal mental health. Conversely, it is very helpful for such mothers’ mental health to connect them with support in that sensitive period. Even if the Azure card is as harmful as many of us think it is, if we provide mothers with the right support and they can feel a sense of solidarity, they can probably manage to survive the difficulties that might arise.

I ask the Minister why availability of transport payments on the Azure card is very limited, and whether the Government will think about extending and expanding that. I think that one can pay for mobile phone top-ups on the Azure card, but I hope that the Government might think about making the payment, particularly to mothers in the perinatal period, a bit more generous and perhaps making it easier for them to call their home countries, and friends and others in this country. Finally, I am not quite clear about the roll-over arrangements. I know that there is generally a limit of £5 per week that can be carried over to the next. Perhaps with families it works differently, but I am concerned that if a parent wants to buy a Christmas or birthday present for a child they should be able to save up over a period of time to do that. I would like clarification on that.

As I said, the Secretary of State in the other place said that this is a supposed to be a temporary arrangement, yet for many families it is far from temporary, and I am concerned about that. There are purposes for this—I see that, and I expect that the Minister will say so—but I wonder whether they justify the harm that this seems to cause.

I should also have mentioned the matter raised by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, about stigma. There are two issues here. First, a family using this card in a local shop may mean that people with whom they are acquainted get to know their status, which may be unhelpful for them and further isolate them. Secondly, there is a question about their perception of themselves. If they go into a shop and they have to produce a special card and then experience a kind of looking down the nose from others in the shop, this may reinforce their sense of difference and isolation. If they are in a vulnerable time in their lives, for instance in or shortly after pregnancy, it may also make it harder for them to reach out to people, in their community possibly, but also to other indigenous people—it may make it harder for them to make those bonds, friendships and acquaintances that are so important.

To conclude, having followed the issue of families in detention in Yarl’s Wood for many years, I would like to say one more time, in the context of the anniversary today of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that I am grateful to the coalition Government for deciding to treat families in this particular area so much better than they were treated in the past. I look forward to the Minister’s response.