Asylum Decisions (Support for Refugees)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir David.

I will start by commenting on what has been said so eloquently by my hon. Friends about the idea that universal credit happens within five weeks, or that 28 days would be enough to get accommodation, if it were needed. If someone were to present themselves as homeless to Birmingham City Council, or just as needing housing, not necessarily as a priority need, it would probably take 18 months before they were given anywhere they could actually live. When my brother applied for universal credit, he decided to grow his beard for the time it took before he got a payment; he looked like Rasputin before he got any funding. That puts it into some perspective.

I want to talk specifically about the effect on refugee women, which I am sure will surprise absolutely no one, and to bring to the Minister’s attention the findings of the “Will I ever be safe?” report by Women for Refugee Women. I think it is vital that this element is included in this debate. The women featured in the report are here in the Gallery listening to our debate. The report details the cases of 106 asylum-seeking and refugee women. They left their countries for a variety of reasons, but around half the women said that they had experienced violence at the hands of the state authorities, 42% had been tortured and almost one third had been raped by soldiers, prisoners, guards or the police in their own country. More than one third of the women had been raped in the private sphere, with others fleeing forced marriage, forced prostitution and other forms of gender-based violence. More than one third of the destitute women were forced into unwanted relationships because of their destitution in this period that we are talking about.

When faced with an impossible situation, very often in those cases the women end up back in dangerous and violent relationships, or exploited as part of a pattern of street homelessness. Certainly, something that I have seen time and again while working with victims of human trafficking is how the constant merry-go-round of destitution for that group of women leaves them severely vulnerable to the people who come along and exploit them for sex. One quarter of the women who were spoken to in the report—bear in mind that suffering sexual violence was part of the reason they fled—were raped or sexually abused when sleeping outside or in other people’s homes.

When I used to work with asylum-seeking women, who at that time were largely from Sierra Leone, in Birmingham, it was often described as moving “from one hell to another”, and that also seems to be the case with this destitution gap. We see that one third of women raped in their home country are then raped again here in the UK. My hon. Friend highlighted the case of Mariam and how long it had taken her to gain access to benefits. That sounded much more realistic than the timeframes laid out, and much closer to my understanding, as a constituency Member of Parliament, of how long it takes to actually access benefits. She waited nine months to get her benefits.

I want to tell a tiny bit of Mariam’s story, so that she does not just become a person who had to wait a little while for benefits and so that we can feel who she is. I will read it in her words:

“I’m from Fumayu in Somalia and came to the UK in November 2008 after fleeing the war. I’m from a minority clan called Bajuni… I escaped the war in Somalia twice. The first time was in the early 1990s. Militiamen broke into our family home and raped me. They raped my daughter Amina as well. She was just 15. The men shot her dead after, and they killed my son too.”

She fled originally to Kenya and then eventually here to the UK. She applied for asylum the day after she arrived. She says:

“Because I had no money, the Home Office put me in a hostel where I got two meals a day.”

Mariam was rehoused in Middlesbrough. She was scared, and the interpreter brought in for her asylum interview spoke Swahili, not Kibajuni, which is the language she speaks. She was made to speak in a different language and found it difficult to explain herself. The Home Office refused her asylum claim. She was eventually granted her benefits, but, as has already been said, her asylum support stopped in January and her benefits did not start for nine months. The Home Office put Mariam in a dirty hotel. She had no money, and she was lucky that she had a solicitor who gave her some cash and that she was able to rely for some things on local charities.

That cannot be the system that the Minister hopes to see for a woman multiply raped, whose children have been killed in front of her. I ask him to consider all the things requested by my hon. Friend.