Immigration: Community Sponsorship

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sheehan]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the progress of the community sponsorship scheme in supporting resettled refugees in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lady Sheehan and at her request, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in her name on the Order Paper.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government’s view is that community sponsorship is a success, thanks to the commitment and compassion of community groups directly welcoming and supporting resettled refugees in their communities. Since the scheme began in July 2016, 219 refugees have been resettled by community sponsor groups across the UK, and the number of community groups taking part continues to increase.

[Lord Paddick]

My Lords, based on the Canadian experience, allowing community groups to take responsibility for refugees should be an economical, efficient and effective way of integrating refugees into society. Yet, as the Minister said, only 219 refugees have been resettled through this route, despite the Home Office providing £1 million in funding to provide training and support for these community groups. What has gone wrong?

[Baroness Barran]

I thought the noble Lord was asking a very fair question until the last moment. I do not think anything has gone wrong; we are seeing a significant acceleration in the number of groups at different stages of the process. Just over 50 groups have gone through the whole community sponsorship process. The work done by Reset and other civil society groups around the country has addressed some of the blocks that meant we got off to a slow start. The application process has been significantly simplified, the training is now available on the Reset website, and groups are starting to share their successes. There are now over 100 groups in the process of application, so we can be confident of seeing a strong increase next year.