Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)

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On a point of order, Sir Roger. On the initial list of witnesses there were some Home Office officials. On the present list, there are no Home Office officials, which makes it much harder for the Opposition to scrutinise the Bill. We had certain questions that we wished to pose to Home Office officials. I put it on the record that they were initially on the list of witnesses but are no longer there.

Bambos Charalambous

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Q Mr Featonby, I am going to ask you some questions about the Bill in which the Red Cross has indicated some interest. According to the Government, the main objectives of the Bill are to increase fairness in the asylum system; to better protect those who are supported and in need of asylum; and to deter illegal entry into the UK and break the business model of people smuggling networks. To what extent do you think this Bill achieves those objectives?

Jon Featonby: I will start off by saying that as the British Red Cross, we very much welcome this opportunity to give evidence to the Committee today, but the short answer to that question is that we do not think the Bill is going to meet those objectives at all. To build on that a bit, we take that from our role as the largest independent provider of advice and support to refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK. We work with around 30,000 people each year in all four countries of the UK, supporting people throughout the asylum process, from when they first enter it to when they get decisions, and in making decisions about what happens next. Through that work, we see that there are three key elements of an asylum system. First, it must be safe for people to access it; secondly, it must be fair and efficient and make decisions in a timely way and, thirdly, those people who are in the system, while they are in the system, should receive the advice and support they need.

At the moment, there are a number of challenges to that, as shown by the number of people taking dangerous journeys to reach the UK, the increasing backlog in asylum decision making and the length of time people are having to wait for a decision on their application. There are also challenges that local authorities, organisations such as our own and, importantly, people in the system face in terms of the support they receive, whether that is support with accommodation, mental health or other areas. We believe those should have been some of the priorities for both this piece of legislation and the new plan for immigration that runs alongside it.

That work is also informed by the people we work with. We run the VOICES Network, which is a group of people with lived experience of the asylum system. They were among those who gave evidence to the Government during the consultation on the new plan, and when we speak to them about this legislation, one of their key messages, as people who have made that dangerous journey, is that there is nothing in the Bill or in the new plan that would have changed the decisions they made.

We absolutely agree that there are too many people making those dangerous journeys; we want to see a reduction in the number of people making dangerous journeys in small boats across the channel as much as anybody else does, but we do not believe the measures in the Bill will do that.

Bambos Charalambous

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Q As a follow-up, how do you think a reduction in those dangerous journeys would be better achieved?

Jon Featonby: There is no simple answer to that; as the Home Secretary said on Second Reading, there is no silver bullet for many of these challenges. If there were, I am sure some country would already have come up with it. However, there are some key things that the Red Cross believes could be explored further.

The expansion of safe routes for people seeking protection is prime among those things. We welcome the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme announced recently. The UK has a good recent record of providing resettlement places, and we believe that on top of that Afghan resettlement scheme there is the need for a wider global scheme. There is the UK resettlement scheme, the successor to the Syrian resettlement programme, but there is no annual quota for that. On top of that 5,000 commitment for the Afghan scheme we would like to see an additional 5,000 for the global scheme.

We also call for refugee family reunion. One of the core bits of work that the Red Cross does in the UK is support refugees being reunited with their family members. As the new plan for immigration stated, family reunion is currently the largest safe route for people to get to the UK. Over the five years to 2019, 29,000 people arrived in the UK through refugee family reunion, compared with 25,000 through resettlement over the same period.

From what we see in our work supporting families, as much as that reunion is a moment of joy for so many people, there are other families whom the current rules do not allow to reunite. One of the prime examples is that the rules do not cater for adult dependent children. A parent in the UK who has refugee status can sponsor their parent, their partner or spouse and any children under the age of 18 to come and join them, but we see that often there are people whose child may have turned 18 or 19, potentially while they were in the asylum process, who face a difficult decision about whether they leave that child overseas, or just do not bring any of their family to come and join them.

We believe the Bill is an opportunity to expand the rules. One of our key concerns about the Bill, in clause 10 on the differential treatment of refugees, is that there is potential for family reunion to be limited, although the Bill does not quite state how.

Alongside those safe routes, we recognise that the UK cannot alone solve all those issues. However, it has a vital role to play internationally, ensuring that no matter where people are after they have been forced to flee their home, they can access protection systems, whether in the UK, France, Germany or close to the countries from which they first leave.

Bambos Charalambous

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Q You mentioned clause 10 in your answer. What other problems do you see with clause 10, which treats people differently depending on how they arrive?

Jon Featonby: The starting point for the British Red Cross is that people’s protection should be based on their protection needs, and not on how they have entered the UK. Clause 10 provides a power that would move away from that and treat people on the basis of how they arrive in the country. It is difficult to ascertain what some of the impact would be, because clause 10 just creates a power for that to be introduced later in the immigration rules. Certainly, our concern is that the list of the ways in which leave can be differentiated for those people recognised as refugees is an example list and non-exhaustive, and there is therefore scope within the immigration rules to follow for that differentiated treatment to be undertaken in a much wider way.

In terms of the impact of that differentiated treatment, which I am sure falls within the Bill’s aim to deter people from making dangerous journeys, we certainly do not believe that it will do that. From the people we work with, we know it is rare for people making those journeys—even if they have any element of choice over where they are going to end up—to have any clear idea about what their rights and entitlements will be when they arrive, so we do not believe it would deter dangerous journeys.

We also believe there would be negative impacts from some of the ways people’s leave will be differentiated. Some of that concern draws on the evidence from Australia, which has used temporary protection visas, similar to those that clause 10 would allow to be introduced, on and off for the past two decades. One of the key findings is that that has increased the insecurity people feel when they have that protection status. This is a group of people who will have been recognised as refugees by the UK Government, but one way they will be treated differently is that those who have arrived irregularly will only get temporary protection for maybe two and a half years, which will then be extendable at each point.

The lack of security around that has an impact on not only people’s mental health, but their prospects for integration and their ability to get jobs and rebuild their lives. Employers looking at that type of temporary leave are less likely, we believe, to employ that person, compared with somebody who might have indefinite leave to remain, as a refugee arriving under the resettlement programme would have.

I have already mentioned our concerns about the potential impact on family reunion. It is important to note that those people arriving in the UK through family reunion are predominantly women and children; 90% of all family reunion visas currently granted are to women and children. Limiting access to family reunion for the refugee in the UK is taking away a safe route for his—in most cases—wife and children to be able to come and join him. The evidence from Australia was that where that happened, it incentivised and increased the number of dangerous journeys being made by women and children, which is something the British Red Cross believes should absolutely be avoided.

One of the other potential routes for differentiation is giving those people granted refugee status no access to public funds. Most of the refugees we support struggle when they are first granted status, and one of the main groups of people we support across all our services in the UK is people who are destitute, at all stages of the asylum process. Around one third of the people we have supported in our destitution services over the past year are people with refugee status, and often that is because they fall into the gap between Home Office and local authority support when they are first granted status and the Home Office support ends.

Without giving people access to the social security and welfare system, you risk embedding some of that destitution at that point as well. Not only is that bad for those individuals, putting them at great risk, but it puts extra pressures on local authorities. We see that within our services at the moment.

Bambos Charalambous

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Q Moving on to clause 11, on asylum accommodation, I know in the past the Red Cross has been critical of the Government’s using Napier Barracks to house asylum seekers. What are your thoughts on clause 11 and dispersal, and what lessons can be learned from the problems with Napier Barracks?

Jon Featonby: The issues with accommodation and the challenges the Home Office faces in providing it are well known and serious, and there is no simple solution to many of them. Some of the problems around the shortage of accommodation were caused by the covid pandemic. We welcome the Home Office’s move at the start of the pandemic not to evict people from asylum accommodation, but that obviously meant that fewer people were moving through the system.

Some of the challenges with the dispersal system and the shortage of housing are also caused by the increasing backlog in asylum decision making. There are now around 70,000 people waiting for an initial decision, the majority of whom have been waiting longer than six months. That includes people from places such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea, who will almost certainly go on to get refugee status, but the lack of throughput in the system has created that pressure. Several Members on this Committee represent areas that do great work hosting people through the dispersal system, but we do not think the Bill will do anything to help them.

The accommodation centres in clause 11 are part of the response to that pressure. As you rightly said, the Red Cross has raised concerns around some of the Ministry of Defence sites that have been used over the last year, and their suitability for people seeking asylum. In particular, we were operational in Penally Barracks in south Wales when that was open, and we continue to support people in Napier.

From our experience, we think that the best way to accommodate people while they are in the asylum system is within communities. They can feel a part of those communities and receive the support that they need. It is also beneficial for those communities, in terms of social cohesion. That relates to some of the negative impacts that we have seen, where people have been accommodated in some of the military barracks.

We also have some concerns about the way that clause 11 currently works. Reading the explanatory notes, what seems to be happening is that, rather than the Bill itself setting out the framework for an accommodation centre, it relies on the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. That legislation was passed almost 20 years ago during a very different time: asylum applications were far higher, the length of time that people waited for a decision was far shorter, and far fewer people were then getting positive decisions after going through that system.

The 2002 Act has quite a few concerning aspects, including not allowing children in accommodation centres to access local authority schools. We see that as being quite serious. It may well be that the idea behind the centres, and the Government’s proposed use of the centres, would include families or children being accommodated there, but that is not clear from what is currently in the Bill. The Bill does, however, change the 2002 Act around some of the limits on the length of time that people can stay in one of those accommodation centres. Currently, under the 2002 Act, somebody in an accommodation centre could only be accommodated there for up to six months. The Bill gives the Home Secretary the power to increase that length of time.

It is noteworthy that, in the recent special development order, which was laid before Parliament to extend the use of Napier Barracks by an additional five years, one of the ways in which the Home Office changed the operation of that site was to limit the length of time that somebody could stay there to 90 days. Therefore, we would certainly see that one of the safeguards around the use of accommodation centres would be to limit the length of time that somebody could stay there, rather than extending it.